Situated Sensibilities and the Need for Coherence: Musical Experience Reconsidered

Let me begin with a disclaimer. When we were first considering this topic as a panel, events of September 1 1 were fresh and raw indeed. I was personally hesitant about being involved in PES session at all even though I had helped to conceptualize it because I wasn't sure that I could handle it emotionally.1 Then I was suffering from what I would call a major power, and location problem. Elsewhere I have described this not in terms of inadequacy, deficiency, or lack, but as a state of mind understood as psychic difficulty confronting a situation (including textual and/or aesthetic experiences) arising from conditions of time, place, social location, and relative sense of control over one's environment.2 As one might have expected, with passing of time, it became easier to speak and theorize about arts in what has come to be known as the aftermath of 9/1 1 My contribution to this topic explores relationship between ethical imperative situated knowing in arts and irreducible propulsion towards wholeness and self-identity in aesthetic experience that seemed to follow in wake of September 11. Soon afterwards, some films, TV programming, and even museum exhibitions were either revised or withdrawn altogether from consuming public fear of being too close to bone of reality . Aesthetic distance was foreshortened almost to extinction, and proclamations about end of irony rang forth in North America's cultural community.3 Concurrently, citizens immediately turned to particular kinds of literature, music, and other arts as a source of psychological healing and spiritual refuge. This trend parallels tension between artists' selfcensorship and their conscious sensitivity to feeling, power, and location problems of respondents in aesthetic experience. These in turn invoke very definition and educational role of aesthetic experience itself, nature of art to say/not say things, and ethical responsibility entailed in both. Ethical responsibility in matters aesthetic is one aspect of what I take to be answerability. In this paper I shall focus on how conflicts and tensions between answerability and symbolic power of music impinge on pedagogical decisions. aftershocks of September 11 foreground unresolvable dichotomy between power of musical art to address directly pre-discursive realm of collective unconscious, to get beneath interpretation, in words of Richard Shusterman,4 and music's mimetic force. My paper explores how this relationship plays out when knowing subject, individually and collectively, is in extremis, A pre-September 1 1 example of what I mean occurs in Caryl Clark's 1997 essay, in which she traces historical and political processes surrounding decision of Council of Europe in 1971 to adopt Beethoven's Ode to Joy as official anthem of new European Union. Committee in its wisdom apparently without musicological counsel -'agreed unanimously' [that] 'Beethoven's music was representative of European genius and capable of uniting hearts and minds of all Europeans,' but because of historical and political controversy over Germanness of Schiller text, Committee members ultimately recommended for time being, . . . only tune a European anthem, without words, ... to allow some time to pass. One day perhaps some words will be adopted by citizens of Europe with same spontaneity as Beethoven's eternal melody has been.5 Yet, as Clark rightly notes, that wordless anthem spoke volumes about still fragile underpinnings of new Europe.6 One aspect of problem posed above is answerability of musical artwork as a wordless icon. For example, Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen, considered by many to be greatest of his final orchestral works, was written in aftermath of World War E and is regarded as unrivalled within western art music as an elegy a nation's culture. According to liner notes on my CD of piece, The writing strings is masterly . . . , and music grows from its opening phrases into one seamless arc of interweaving