Review: Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music by Susan McClary

Review by: Suzanne G. Cusick
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 556-561
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society
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556 Journal of the American Musicological Society

raises wider questions about the writing of music history. Could the reception
of the music of other composers or epochs be similarly interpreted as a “stack-
ing up” of contending paraphrases? Would this approach work for composi-
tions that, unlike Schütz’s, have remained part of the performing repertory
since their creation? These are not questions that Varwig addresses, but they
are a measure of the power of her monograph to stimulate new ways of think-
ing about music history.
STEPHEN ROSE

Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music, by Susan McClary.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. xi, 340 pp.

“The eighteenth century was a period of almost unparalleled confidence in the

viability of a public sphere in which ideas could be successfully communicated,
difference negotiated, consensus achieved: . . . people . . . put a premium on
intelligibility and the efficacy of shared discourses.”1
Thus wrote Susan McClary, in her 2000 book Conventional Wisdom.
Although she might not have meant it at the time, McClary’s comment could
serve as one hermeneutic key to her life’s work as a musicologist. At least since
the 1991 publication of Feminine Endings, that work has been characterized
by the premium she herself places on “intelligibility and the efficacy of shared
discourses”—whether it be the intelligibility across disciplinary boundaries of
her own arguments about music or, more important to her, the intelligibility
of musical texts and reception practices to students and scholars of other dis-
courses.2 Becoming ever more skilled at writing a musicology that thinkers
outside our field eagerly read, she has provided ever new models for how such
writing might be done. Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music con-
firms McClary’s place as one of our discipline’s most effective emissaries to the
wider intellectual world, and therefore as one of our few public intellectuals.
Beautifully written, rich with astute readings of pieces from Giulio Caccini’s
“Amarilli mia bella” to the chaconne of J. S. Bach’s D-Minor violin partita
(BWV 1004), the book makes several sustained, intertwining arguments.
Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, McClary argues for a nonteleological un-
derstanding of the multiple approaches to pitch organization that character-
ized European music in the seventeenth century. Tonality was not, she asserts,
an intrinsically superior, more highly evolved system of pitch organization
than the modality of sixteenth-century music. Rather, she shows, the practices

1. Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000), 64–65.
2. Idem, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991).

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 Reviews 557

that eventually coalesced into common-practice tonality were known to com-

posers at least as early as 1600. Those practices could be, and often were, mar-
shaled toward the creation of affective states that brimmed with desire.
Sometimes, in her telling, such musical desire clearly served texts or theatrical
moments that represented sexual desire; sometimes it evoked the desire of
Counter-Reformation Catholics for spiritual union with the divine; and some-
times it seems simply to have instantiated an extraordinary dynamism and
longing for futurity that, McClary suggests, characterized many Italian struc-
tures of feeling in the seventeenth century. But, as she says so succinctly in the
book’s “prelude,” “tonality was never the only game in town” (p. 17). Modal
practice persisted throughout the century (and beyond), used by composers
who meant to instantiate up-to-date structures of feeling that often privileged
pleasure—an immersion in moments of sonorous beauty. To her great credit,
McClary does not oversimplify this argument: modal process is not necessarily
mapped onto pleasure, nor tonal process onto desire. Rather, almost every
close reading shows tonal and modal procedures to mix together unpre-
dictably with emerging preferences for register, conventions associated with
certain dances, and ideas about gender, sexuality, spirituality, and power to
produce sonic representations of pleasure and desire. One needs to take ac-
count of their interaction with each other, McClary argues, to understand the
many musics of modernity’s subtle and creative first century. Seventeenth-
century musics, thus understood, can offer “evidence” not otherwise available
“for anyone seeking to understand the people who lived in another time and
place . . . assumptions concerning temporality, affect, the body, the divine, sex-
uality, sociality, ethics, and selfhood” (p. 5).
This complex of arguments, prefigured in an opening “prelude,” unfolds in
five sections of two chapters each. The first, “The Hydraulics of Musical
Desire,” is the most traditionally analytical, as it aims to establish the formal
and syntactical principles on which subsequent analyses are based. Its first
chapter contrasts well-known examples by Giulio Caccini, Claudio Monte-
verdi, and Marc’Antonio Cesti to distinguish between modal procedures and
the tricks of prolongation and internal exploration of temporary tonal centers
that constitute the “expansion principle” which for McClary is the key princi-
ple of tonality. A second chapter shows these procedures at work in multisec-
tioned cantatas and sonatas. The two chapters of “Gendering Voice,” the next
section, trace the institutional history from which a “fetish” for the soprano
register emerged, and use that fetish as a key to understanding the often highly
erotic conventions of gender-bending in so many “Venetian” operas. A third
section, “Divine Love,” focuses on Counter-Reformation Catholicism’s en-
couragement of desire-driven musics to channel erotic longing toward mysti-
cal union with the divine, and interprets the tonal extremes of Frescobaldi’s
toccatas as audible signs of and invitations to mystical ecstasy. Section four,
“Dancing Bodies,” first narrates the complicated trans-Atlantic history of the
ciaccona/chaconne, from its reputed Mesoamerican origins through its use by

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558 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Monteverdi, Lully, and Bach, as a way of rehabilitating the cultural importance

of dance music, and then interprets the quite different tonal procedures of
German and French dance movements as symptoms of different embodied
experiences of social power. The final section, “La Mode Française,” builds on
the previous section’s arguments about the distinctive, dance-based aesthetic
of Louis XIV’s court, first to illuminate and celebrate a musical temporality
that revels in sustained moments of pleasure, and second to celebrate the ex-
traordinary defiance of tragédie lyrique’s femmes fatales, whose unrepentant
flaunting of insatiable tonal desire results in self-exile but not in defeat. A brief
“postlude” contrasts the tonal, desire-driven musics of Scarlatti and Corelli
with the often eloquent mixing of tonal and modal procedures that persist in
music by Carissimi, Bach, and even Beethoven.
Despite the prelude’s warnings against teleology, the book’s vaguely
chronological organization of examples may tempt readers to expect a linear
history either of tonality’s triumph over modal processes or of tonality’s assim-
ilation of them; or, it may tempt them to expect a narrative tracing musical in-
scriptions of desire and pleasure. Such readers may find the book frustrating,
for although Desire and Pleasure often comments on these histories, its real
story is, I believe, a different one. I think the book is best read as a carefully ar-
ticulated effort to reintroduce the musics of seventeenth-century Italy and
France—and to present them to specialists and nonspecialists alike as vivid evi-
dence of what Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams described as “struc-
tures of feeling.”
As defined in his highly influential Marxism and Literature, these consist of
“affective elements of consciousness and relationship” that could constitute “a
structure: as a set, with specific internal relations at once interlocking and in
tension.”3 McClary seems to me to take this idea very seriously, using each of
the book’s five sections to assemble a set of elements “with specific internal re-
lations” that vary from example to example but that represent (or even consti-
tute) a way of being in the world which, if different from ours, is both
intelligible and audible.
For example, in the section entitled “Gendering Voice” McClary assembles
(1) the seventeenth-century fashion for the soprano voice; (2) the century’s
increasing preference for extroverted and presentational rather than intro-
verted and participatory performance, which (3) transformed the voice from a
signifier of agency into an objectified commodity (4) to be celebrated for its
sheer physicality. She further shows that (5) the implied temporality of the ear-
liest repertoire for soprano ensemble, composed for the concerto delle donne in
Ferrara, privileged a temporality that celebrated dynamic change, velocity, and
acceleration, and (6) a texture that juxtaposed soprano voices against the har-
monic governance of a bass that eventually slipped over into registral prefer-

3. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Marxist Introductions (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.

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 Reviews 559

ences in instrumental music. Noting the way that the fashion (or fetish) for so-
prano voices (7) fueled an increasing market for castrato singing, she further
shows how (8) the operatic coding of castrati as both heroic and erotic agents
served the century’s fascination with gender play. Finally, she uses a beautifully
provocative reading of Cavalli’s Giasone to reconcile the aforementioned har-
monic governance by the bass register to the way that register was used in
Italian opera. There (9) it can be heard as the voice of a patriarchal authority
enjoyed at the expense of erotic agency and emotional expressivity. Inter-
locked with elements of modal and tonal practice that McClary elaborates in
the book’s other sections, and understood as deeply rooted in the social expe-
rience of being alive in seventeenth-century Italy, these elements constitute a
set of conventions that may come as close as anything anyone has yet written
to reconstructing a Williams-esque structure of feeling made of musical
sound. Certainly, by connecting these elements into something like a “struc-
ture of feeling,” McClary offers readers a way of hearing seventeenth-century
music that is richly human and humane.
“Methodologically,” Williams wrote, “a ‘structure of feeling’ is a cultural
hypothesis . . . derived from attempts to understand such elements and their
connections in a generation or period. . . .”4 If one reads McClary’s book as a
cumulative set of cultural hypotheses about how socially constructed elements
of musical sound could interact to express and, when written down, partly
document the way it felt to be alive in seventeenth-century Europe, the vari-
ous objections “experts” may pose to some details in the description or history
of an element can fall away. To take one example from “Gendering Voice,” I
would have preferred more notice of the fact that soprano is a masculine noun
in Italian, and hardly ever the noun seventeenth-century documents used to
refer to singing women. (That noun is usually donna, woman; in my experi-
ence, soprano invariably refers to boys or men.) This fact complicates the
claims one might make about women singers’ dominance of performance op-
portunities; but it also complicates the gendering of voice and register that
McClary advances, in ways that make the century’s play with unstable gender
and same-sex eroticism even more interesting (and quite a bit more queer)
than her account suggests. Perhaps more importantly, it complicates and
queers the way nonspecialists would be invited by this section to hear the styl-
ized erotic play of two instrumental lines in that register: sexual difference
between soprano partners seems not to have been audible, necessarily pleasur-
able, or even desirable as a feature of their metaphorical erotic display. In a
way, all this is but a quibble, for these details do not fundamentally alter the
recovered “structure of feeling” with which this section of McClary’s book
presents its readers. The same can be said of any number of quibbles, ques-
tions, or quarrels that the details of some chapters might provoke.

4. Ibid., 132–33.

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560 Journal of the American Musicological Society

McClary’s style of argument throughout may be best described as

painterly, in that the work of describing music in a culture of shared discourses
is done with brushstrokes rather than with finely drawn lines.5 Sometimes the
details of a piece’s origin or likely context—details that might make the argu-
ment read the way a Botticelli painting looks—are missing, or slightly off; but
these details can be filled in easily enough by specialist readers. Their absence
does not leave readers with a blur, however, so much as it produces arguments
rich with startling, intensely illuminating insights that read the way a Cara-
vaggio painting looks. In that regard, McClary’s style of argument instantiates
one aspect of the Baroque structure of feeling that her book ably reconstructs.
If McClary’s argumentation pays homage to the Baroque, so does her writ-
ing, which is vivid and dramatic. At their best, the book’s close descriptions of
musical detail evoke so well the musical experience of organ bench or voice
studio that one can almost feel fingers moving across keys in search of knowl-
edge and ecstasy, torsos expelling columns of air upward toward a pitch that
offers the self in sacrifice, mouths that spit out “invectives with furious speed”
(p. 270). Such writing goes a long way toward recovering this music as an em-
bodied, fully effable medium of experience that links individuals to their social
worlds in ways that specialists and nonspecialists alike can understand.
McClary’s desire to explain this music in a way that can contribute to public
conversation extends, too, to her frequent, code-switching allusions to popu-
lar culture. If this is mainly to pop performers and texts best known to people
of a certain age, it is nonetheless effective and often witty, as when McClary
aptly likens the erotic subjectivity of Cavalli’s Giasone, in the eponymous
opera, to that sung by Prince’s “Do Me, Baby” (pp. 123, 125). McClary
often frames sections or chapters with anecdotes that identify with nonspecial-
ists in a way that both undermines and quietly points out the elitism to which
a scholar’s hard-won expertise always tempts. However the expert readers of
this journal might feel about it, I know that the code-switching, pop refer-
ences, and nonspecialist identifications would appeal to my dean, a neurobiol-
ogist with vast knowledge of blues-based musics but almost none of Bach,
much less Cavalli or D’Anglebert. This book will help deans like him under-
stand what historical musicologists do and why it matters.
Still, if this book aims to reach nonspecialist, cross-disciplinary readers like
my dean, those readers might have needed a bit more explanation of the
analytical language McClary uses. What does she mean by “descent” or
“background?” While readers of this journal can be assumed to know, those
others cannot, and their uncertainty might tempt them to skip over the loving
detail of the musical exegesis and hence to miss out on exactly the musical
arguments—and music—dearest to McClary’s heart. Similarly, given that

5. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of Development of Style in
Later Art, trans. from the 7th German ed. (1921) by M. D. Hottinger ([New York]: Dover,
[1932]). In distinguishing Baroque from “classical” art, Wölfflin famously described the former as
favoring painterly over linear style.

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 Reviews 561

many arguments about individual pieces are made on the basis of what and
how listeners heard, the absence of audio examples is notable. True, most of
the pieces discussed are readily available in the recorded anthologies that ac-
company music history texts, or via the online sources for streaming audio,
but the book would have made a more effective contribution to interdiscipli-
nary conversation if the publisher had led nonspecialist readers to these
sources.
Because McClary has been closely associated with the feminist impulse of
so-called new musicology, and because this book’s “prelude” acknowledges
the importance of feminist theory to her thinking, both specialist and nonspe-
cialist readers may expect this book to make a feminist intervention in the way
we think and write about music’s history. Such readers may be surprised that
there are no musical examples by women composers and relatively little men-
tion of women’s contributions to, or comments on, the musical structures of
feeling that emerged in seventeenth-century Europe. These omissions remind
us how recently the scholarship focused on women’s musicalities has moved
into print and, particularly, how few compositions by women have become
readily available for close analysis, despite decades of musicological feminism.
Rather than criticize McClary’s savvy choice to build her argument around
musical examples that are easily accessible to all, readers of this journal might
be moved to think critically about the institutional forces that continue to
marginalize the histories and traces of women’s musical creativity, making
them difficult to incorporate even in a narrative as grounded in cultural and
feminist theory as this one. The book reminds us that we still have work to do.
Indeed, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music offers readers of
this journal a model for writing a feminist music history with broad chrono-
logical sweep. Its narrative thoroughly rehabilitates the aesthetic principle of
pleasure, associated with the feminine in seventeenth-century culture (and
since), and it explicitly opposes the masculinized drive toward specific goals
that characterizes both tonal desire as it is often construed and the tradition
that has traced tonality’s history. Moreover, by integrating feminine, femi-
nized, and even effeminate aesthetic principles, by frankly acknowledging
musical bodies and eroticized sounds, and by repeatedly showing the inextri-
cability of music’s syntactical processes from its cultural context, McClary ar-
ticulates a socially grounded grand narrative full of openings for discussion and
further research on such matters. In challenging the old, Adlerian historiogra-
phy that privileged the evolution of tonality above almost any other kind of
tale, and replacing it with a musically rich realization of Williams’s more mal-
leable “structure of feeling,” McClary has successfully displaced a foundational
myth of musicology that has long haunted efforts to integrate gender, sexual-
ity, bodies, erotics, and spirituality into historical accounts of the way human
musicking sounds. She has shown us—and the colleagues in other fields
whom she draws into our conversations—one very effective way to tell such
stories.
SUZANNE G. CUSICK

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