Music, Gesture and the Embodiment of the Utopian Imagination

Richard Leppert

(University of Minnesota)

“Musical meaning does not depend on being decoded; it

depends on being lived.” Lawrence Kramer

My remarks today concerning gesture will largely center on

music’s engagement of time and space. I’ll start with a few general

observations, some obvious, others perhaps less so.

Music has its own internal time and space, but music is realized

within the time and space of the world external to the composition.

The relationship of inside to outside is conflicted, dialectical, and

dynamic. I’ll principally focus my attention on the spatial dimension

of music to the extent that my concern is the music’s visual

representation. But first I need to clarify my interest in music’s

relation to temporality, and on this issue I can’t do better than to cite

Adorno in an essay that addresses the relation between music and

painting. Here is his comment:

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 The self-evident, that music is a temporal art, that it unfolds in

time, means, in the dual sense, that time is not self-evident for

[music], that [music] has time as its problem. It must create

temporal relationships among its constituent parts, justify their

temporal relationship, synthesize them through time.

Conversely, it itself must act upon time, not lose itself to it;

[music] must stem itself against the empty flood. i

(Adorno’s imperative that music act to stem itself against the empty

flood is, of course, an invocation of music as a form of utopian

resistance to dystopian actuality. I’ll return to this at the end of my

paper.)

I invoke the category of time in two ways: first, with regard to

the now-time of the performance moment; second, with regard to

history to which any now-time necessarily refers and sediments. In

other words, music, experienced in time and, in essence, of time,

invites a heightened engagement with the problematics of

temporality. Temporality is a fundamental category of what

constitutes both modernity and modern self-reflexivity about the

nature of selfhood. In brief, temporality is a foundational category of

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modern knowledge; and music is a principal means by which human

beings engage with the experience of time. Music, we might say, is

knowledgeable about time. Adorno preferred to make a broader

claim: “I believe in the strict knowability of music,” he said, “ –

because music is itself knowledge, and in its way very strict

knowledge.” ii

Music is meaningful, but what music means is invariably

uncertain and unstable. What music knows it tends to keep to itself.

Perhaps that’s too strong an assertion, but I’ll keep to it if only to

emphasize the need to realize—to perform, to make real—what music

knows. I think it’s fair to say that musicians’ actions making music

fundamentally involve a non-linguistic hermeneutics resulting from a

complex set of performance decisions that function to reveal what

music knows.

I’d like to look at the inside of music, so to speak, but by

surveilling its external gestural life in performance. To state this less

coyly, I’ll share some thoughts about the look of music in

performance, which fundamentally circulates around and through

the human bodies of musicians and auditors.

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 Music has been a prime subject of visual representation since

the dawn of recorded time. Prior to motion photography and its

aftermath, visualized music—music, that is, remembered as an image

of a past sonic event—was restricted to fixed imagery. The still-image

representation of musical events presents both problems and

opportunities for musical hermeneutics. The downside is obvious

enough: still images freeze time and motion; a single frame must

somehow capture the essence of an event whose very life is

determined by motion. The deadly stasis of the fixed image,

nevertheless, offers opportunity to the extent that the viewer can

focus or concentrate on a single moment and perhaps discover in that

freeze-frame an insight into the ways in which the single detail

sediments a whole that might otherwise be lost in the effect of

experiencing motion that cannot be halted, which is of course the

reality of performance. Adorno once quipped that, structurally, one

hears the first bar of a Beethoven symphonic movement only at the

moment one hears the last bar; iii I suspect he’s right. But putting

together first and last over a long time-span is no small feat and, in

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the end, may be quite a Proustian task, however worthy. Still image

representation of music offers another route to such a goal.

Music's effects and meanings, which in performance are

produced both aurally and visually, in painting must be rendered

visually only. The way of seeing hence incorporates the way of

hearing: the artist must represent music in such a way that its

meanings will be congruent with those produced by sight and sound

together in the lived experience of the original and intended viewer.

To render visually meaningful the acoustic phenomenon of music, the

artist engages semiotic codes that operate as a sight when music is

made in real life.

The visual code functions through the human body in its

efforts to make and receive music. When people hear a musical

performance they see it as an embodied activity. While they

hear they also witness: how the performers look and gesture,

how they are costumed, how they interact with their

instruments and with one another, how they regard the

audience, and so on. Listeners also see themselves in relation to

other listeners as well as to the performers. Thus the musical

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event is perceived as a socialized activity. Visual

representation in effect summarizes by encapsulation more or

less all of this, not as a "disinterested" record of events but as a

coherent and discursive, and commonly dialectical vision of the

varied relations within the context of which sound occurs and

hence, sound comes to mean. Visual art can’t replicate musical

acoustics, but it can provide an invaluable hortatory account of

what, how, and why a given society heard, hence in part what

the sounds meant.

The visual representation of music foremost concerns

bodies. My interest in vision focuses upon the physicality of

music making (the sight of the body's labors to produce sound),

and on the (ironic) fact that the "product" of this activity—

musical sonority—lacks all concreteness and disappears

without a trace almost instantly once the musician's "physical

labors" cease (acoustic decay). Precisely because musical sound

is abstract, intangible and ethereal—lost as soon as it is

gained—the visual experience of its production is crucial to

both musicians and audience alike for locating and

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communicating the place of music and musical sound within

society and culture. I am suggesting, in other words, that the

slippage between the physical activity to produce musical

sound and the abstract nature of that which is produced creates

a semiotic contradiction that is ultimately "resolved" to a

significant degree via the agency of human sight. Music,

despite its phenomenological sonoric ethereality, is an

embodied practice, like dance and theater. As such, its visual-

performative aspect is no less central to its meanings than are

the visual components of these other performing arts.

In a moment, I’ll turn to some images, the better to

account for what I’ve thus far suggested. Before doing so, I

need to say a little more about what I’m claiming for the

semiotic richness of the frozen musical image. I’ll let Barthes do

my talking, this from an essay called “Diderot, Brecht,

Eisenstein.” Here’s Barthes:

In order to tell a story, the painter has only an instant at

his disposal, the instant he is going to immobilize on the

canvas, and he must thus choose it well, assuring it in

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 advance of the greatest possible yield of meaning and

pleasure. Necessarily total, this instant will be artificial, . .

. a hieroglyph in which can be read at a single glance . . .

the present, the past and the future; that is, the historical

meaning of the represented action. This crucial instant,

totally concrete and totally abstract, is what Lessing

subsequently calls . . . the pregnant moment. iv

Barthes, parsing Brecht, then identifies what he terms the social

gest, drawing close to what will be my concerns. The social gest

for Brecht resides within the pregnant moment. Barthes

explains the phrase as follows:

[The social gest] is a gesture or set of gestures . . . in which

a whole social situation can be read. Not every gest is

social: there is nothing social in the movements a man

makes in order to brush off a fly; but if this same man,

poorly dressed, is struggling against guard-dogs, the gest

becomes social. v

•••

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 Now for a small social gest, a certain physical comportment,

around which an historical moment centers itself in order to

articulate, through music, an outline for a society and the individuals

inhabiting it, in which is offered a utopian as well as a dystopian

reading of the future. The painting, from 1633, is by the Dutch artist

Jan Molenaer (Fig. 1); it represents a musical party as the visual

device around which to organize a marriage portrait and an

allegorical commentary promoting marital fidelity. vi The semiotic

argument of the painting develops from one small vignette

embedded in the figure of the woman sitting in the middle, holding a

partbook, at once singing and marking time with her right hand, a

gesture of self-restraint that serves to keep together an ensemble that

includes a lutenist and cellist. Her gesture marks musical mesure

(measure) standing-in visually as a referent for order, regulation, and

moderation. Her hand movement is subtle, so much so as to be

difficult for her fellow performers to see. She displays her hand less

for them than for us. But precisely because the gesture can explain

itself solely as a musical, and not social, matter, Molenaer clarifies his

intent by representing another arm gesture that is literally

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spectacular and quite impossible to miss. Its bizarreness marks its

importance as a gloss clarifying the function of the image as a whole,

and extending this meaning well beyond the obligation to fix for

posterity the appearance of the newlyweds. I’m referring to the

preposterous gesture of the man, standing behind the woman

keeping time, who waters down wine held in a glass at his side by

pouring from a jug held high above his head. Molenaer borrowed

this visual detail from a contemporaneous emblem-book print

representing the virtue of Temperance (Fig. 2). vii The semiotic

importance of the detail is evident not only from the singularity of

the man's action, but also by the fact that the pitcher is

compositionally located at the upper center of the picture frame, thus

making emphatic its sign-value for the painting as a whole.

The art historian P. J. J. van Thiel suggests that the painting is

formally organized around the proposal of a thesis (marital

temperance) set against a subsidiary antithesis (intemperance).

Antithesis is twice represented: in the background at the extreme left,

in small scale, two men in the act of stabbing each other with knives,

referencing anger (ira); and in the foreground, lower left, a chained

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monkey absurdly embracing a cat, a reference to enslavement to the

senses and, in particular, to lust, the cat being a common symbol of

libidinous temperament. The cat and monkey are offset by the dog,

(fides, fidelity)—not coincidentally male—standing guard by the

newlyweds. Van Thiel calls the picture a "mirror of virtue" for the

husband and wife alike, what he terms a "key to an harmonious

married life." viii

But there’s more to it. First, moderation or temperance is

articulated as a class issue. Moderation is a possibility for, and the

obligation of, the upper social orders. It’s peasants who are violent

and who behave with anarchical excess. Accordingly, they’re threats

to themselves and to the social order whose calm they disturb. The

painting's sights engender sounds in opposition: namely, the sounds

of art music versus the sounds of brutality, for fights are punctuated

by animal-like grunts and groans and often by cries of pain. The

painting invites, perhaps even compels, its viewers to envision and to

hear the difference between chaos and order, the antisocial and the

social.

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 Second, there’s the matter of gender relations. The marriage

portrait was characteristically commissioned by the groom and given

as a gift to his bride. But it was a gift with strings attached to the

extent that it asserted his expectations of her in all the permanence of

the picture's visibility. In Molenaer’s painting, the husband wears

outdoors garb—hat, cape and boots: he lives in the larger world. Put

differently, he’s not always home. Thus the famous Dutch

emblematist, Jacob Cats: "The husband must be on the street to

practice his trade/ The wife must stay at home to be in the kitchen." ix

The painting, however, unlike the husband, will be permanently at

home, prominently displayed in the dwelling as a surveillance,

ideally, intended to address the husband's prime anxiety produced

by his absences: his wife's sexual fidelity, x which in Dutch culture

was the corner stone of domestic and social order. xi In this regard,

then, it is not going too far to suggest that the painting's musical

metaphor stands in for the very possibility of Dutch culture itself.

You might notice that your eyes tend to dart about the painting,

taking in the binaries governing the whole: thesis/antithesis;

order/chaos. The painting’s compositional organization is complex

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and notably unstable, almost requiring us to shift our glance here,

there, and back. What Molenaer encodes by this means constitutes

another lesson that works to overdetermine the argument for mesure:

namely, that the success of mesure is not only the product of will but

also the product of watchfulness. xii The fact that the painting is a

marriage portrait, intended to decorate the home, the wife’s space, is

to suggest that the ideal viewer for the image is the wife herself, who

as a viewer must hence watch herself being watched, not only for the

good of the marriage, but also for the good of Dutch society itself.

The small hand gesture of the singer at the painting’s center—the

gesture itself measured, modest—constitutes itself as the key to a

pedagogy that a certain kind of music likewise signals, a music of

harmony and resolved dissonance, of voice and accompaniment, of a

normalized hierarchy between the horizontal and the vertical in

musical structures that increasingly will come to mark the very

nature of musical modernity.

Whereas the husband, worldly, appears to look outside the

picture, as if towards where he is heading, out into the world; the

woman looks inward. She stares slightly downwards, though not I

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think not at anything specific. As regards the musical ensemble

around which the image is constructed, what the viewer sees (i.e.,

ideally the wife looking from outside the picture in at herself) within

the picture she (only) hears. She does not look; she listens. In other

words, for the characters inside the painting music accrues meaning

as a sonoric phenomenon, whereas from outside the painting, for the

viewer, who can see but cannot hear the events represented, music

means as a sight. For the one intended and ideal viewer, the wife, the

two elements of the semiotic equation—sight and sound—converge.

It should be clear that the pleasure of music is not at issue in

Molenaer's painting. Indeed, nothing in the picture seems to produce

the slightest joy; all of the participants are uncannily serious for a

wedding celebration. For Molenaer's presumed patron, the absence of

pleasure is useful for driving home an underlying fact of social

organization: that the personal, including the personally pleasurable,

is political, that politics is inevitably a serious business, and that

"entertainment" and politics don’t exist in separate spheres. xiii The

arts, music notably included, discursively "transliterate" the political

process into an aesthetic chronicle, xiv even—perhaps especially—

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when, as with later romanticism, the arts are theorized under the

guise of the philosophical rejection of the political. xv Music's

pleasure (or its pain) is a sonoric account of the world.

In sum, the apparent simplicity of a hand gesture, on one level

intended to keep an ensemble in time, registers as a sign of more

complex actualities. At a minimum the hand gesture is the

constitutive element in a complex visual-sonoric pedagogy of both

micro- and macro- social organization, articulated through the

human body, in this instance the body as sign, a body that for the

benefit of the viewer pays attention to a present and an imagined

future through somatic comportment. xvi The sign’s semiotic

instability, in its own historical moment and in ours, is acknowledged

precisely by the painter’s citation of the emblematic gloss that makes

emphatic a signifiance—the sign-ness—of the compositional hub

around which the various events occur. By drawing our attention to

the element of sign-ness, the viewer is visually informed to pay

attention. The viewer is invited to acknowledge the contingency of

the moment frozen in time—a moment rendered pregnant by the arc

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of water, stopped like the action captured in a sports photo. Within

this split second hangs a future.

Gestures are by no means natural. Body comportment, as

Norbert Elias describes in his history of manners, is both learned and

inconstant. xvii The gestures and the placement of bodies in Molenaer’s

painting repeatedly denaturalize themselves in the modes of their

strangeness—modes, as it were, of estrangement, precisely in the

Brechtian sense: peasants fighting perhaps to the death (knives are

involved) in a marriage portrait, pets behaving oddly; newlyweds

standing off-center; servants tidying up. Brechtian gest, in the apt

recent account by Joy Calico, “are stylized behaviors designed to

reveal the socially constructed nature of human interaction,” xviii a

definition that fits nicely with the impact of the Temperance emblem

in Molenaer’s painting, whatever the painter’s specific intention.

What clearly is Molenaer’s intention is to estrange the painting’s first-

glance naturalism by rendering it quickly nonsensical in the absence

of hermeneutical contemplation. It’s meaning—what I’ll call it’s

allusion to its being meaningful—is a reality that must be thought and

taught.

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 •••

In the long history of modernity, bodily control is the sine qua

non marker of the class identity for the bourgeoisie. Identity,

however, commonly understood in terms of personal character, is

profoundly abstract. It’s not "located" in the physical body as such,

yet identity requires legibility to the extent that identity is projected

outward so as to be confirmed to the self by its being reflected back

by those to whom it’s projected. Challenged to make identity

visible—in essence, "objectively concrete"—we "employ" the physical

body as the proving ground of the soul, since the body is the only

available terrain onto which the non-physical can be visualized.

Consider representation. Portraits usually confront viewers, to the

extent that they are always "ready" to be seen: the sitters stand

prepared to be looked at in eternity (Fig. 3). Norman Bryson points

out that "Essentially advertent in form, [portraits] show their sitters as

turning a persona, decked out and waiting, toward the one who will

come and view." xix In portraits, whether painted or photographed,

we read people first and foremost via their facial features. But in a

portrait, the put-on face must account for all the complexities of the

17
person represented; it must encapsulate a meaning or set of meanings

that define the portrait's very purpose. Stated differently, portraits

are never painted simply to document that "I am ..." but rather to

document what "I mean ..." Their ultimate purpose is less to denote

(that this is Joe) but to connote (this is the sort of person Joe is).

Portraits characteristically de-emphasize the representation of

strong emotions or reactions. Usually excluded, for example, are

facial signs of "surprise, disgust, sadness, anger, fear, and happiness"

in favor of some unnamable foundation of true character, as opposed

to mere fleeting expression. What we are left with is what Richard

Brilliant names "masks of convention," that both reveal and hide—in

art and sometimes in our outward behaviors. " These masks of

convention are, in Brilliant’s formulation, “self-imposed disguises

allowing the wearer to impersonate someone, even himself, in a

favourable guise." xx Portraiture of the bourgeoisie, as with the

aristocracy, project seriousness, especially with men. Their function is

always strategic; whatever presentness they claim, their address is

more to the future, an effort at effecting permanence. All of this is

18
evident in Molenaer’s marriage portrait, concerning which permit me

one additional observation about facial gesture (Fig. 1).

In the Western art history, for many centuries, smiles were

appropriate, with rare exceptions, solely as part of the

representational vocabulary used to represent the lower classes.

Western painting on the whole has looked askance at smiling people,

reading the expression as a sign of social irresponsibility and lack of

self-control. The smile represents pleasure, and pleasure (or fun) as

such has rarely been regarded as an important pictorial topos. The

smile, which conflated too easily with mirth, worked against the

serious business assigned to portraiture. The smile had nothing to do

with issues of social power, and it betrayed too much of the interior

life (life as lived for itself, so to speak) of otherwise responsible sitters

whose identity was well anchored in the value placed on extreme

physical reserve. In short, the smile said the wrong thing about

important people. No one hints at a smile in Molenaer’s painting. If

smiles are rarely visible on the faces of the upper orders, it is safe to

say that toothy smiles are virtually never represented in portraits.

Teeth belong to the representational vocabulary of society’s bottom

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rungs, presumably as a marker of their putatively carefree lives and

lack of responsibility (Fig. 4). This genre painting of children making

music, you’ll note, is also by Molenaer.

Not coincidentally, the facial sternness of early-modern and

later portraiture is duly accompanied by a dramatic change in dress

code. There occurred a dramatic moving away from the overdress of

the aristocracy, the poster boys for which were the French nobility, in

favor of the first appearance of what we know today as the three-

piece business suit which, in truth, hasn’t changed much from

Gainsborough’s time. Fashion historians have termed this sartorial

revolution the Great Male Renunciation, adopted as an outside sign

of the new order’s seriousness and moral efficacy. xxi (Fig. 5).

•••

I’d like now to consider the relation between musical

performance and gesture from the standpoint of audience, and in the

nineteenth century, when the newly triumphant middle class self-

consciously—and obsessively—worked to define the parameters of

its own emerging class identity on an ideological base defined by

various conceptions of "individuality" As Peter Gay aptly stated the

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matter, "The nineteenth century was intensely preoccupied with the

self, to the point of neurosis." xxii

Within the context of nineteenth-century self-hood, the virtuoso

musician, say Paganini or Liszt, was a troublesome paradox: at once,

the literal embodiment of extreme individuality but one that ran risk

of exceeding the demands of bourgeois decorum, reserve, and

respectability. The extreme individuality of the virtuoso might as

easily be read as the self-serving and solipsistic excesses of the old

aristocracy which in many ways it mirrored—with the difference that

virtuosos were performing for money in a new market economy of

the arts, putting on a show which respectable people paid money to

watch. For some onlookers—those carried away with it all—the

sublime was experienced vicariously; others of course were

convinced that were simply being taken to the cleaners. Either way,

the virtuoso's performance at once realized art while often quite

flagrantly, even shamelessly, staging personal identity as spectacle.

Liszt's audience impact was profound and commonly

profoundly disturbing, even to the point of his seeming a threat to

the social order. In brief, for many, the experience of witnessing him

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perform was an undoing. In the words of one review, quite typical,

Lizst "breaks us up to the very core of our soul, and up-harrows the

very subsoil and fundaments of our mind." The language is fully

informed by the dark language of possession: "Our feelings have

been unripped, torn, and decomposed as it were; but it is not

disorganization which follows, but reconstruction, regeneration!"

[original emphasis and punctuation]. xxiii Liszt is established as the

Nietzschean Superman avant la lettre.

The editor of the Edinburgh Review, Henry Reeve, left what has

become a famous account of a Liszt performance in Paris from 1835.

While it is impossible to know the precise accuracy of Reeve's

memoir, what matters most is the evident expectation of emotional

release triggered by Liszt's playing, alike on Liszt himself and his

audience (Fig. 6):

As the closing strains began [from one of the Venetian boat

songs in Mendelssohn's Songs without Words] I saw Liszt's

countenance assume that agony of expression, mingled with

radiant smiles of joy, which I never saw in any other human

face, except in the paintings of our Saviour by some of the early

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 masters; his hands rushed over the keys, the floor on which I

sat shook like a wire, and the whole audience were wrapped in

sound, when the hand and frame of the artist gave way; he

fainted in the arms of the friend who was turning over [the

pages] for him, and we bore him out in a strong fit of hysterics.

The effect of this scene was really dreadful. The whole room

sat breathless with fear, till Hiller came forward and announced

that Liszt was already restored to consciousness and was

comparatively well again. xxiv

Liszt transfixes his audience, while Reeve deifies him. Liszt's

playing seemingly embraces the entire audience and virtually

ravishes them with its physical prowess. Thus captivated, the

onlookers experience—and to a degree visually witnesses—a musical

and physical climax that shakes the room, followed by an equally

dramatic physical collapse and loss of consciousness: a total

decentering of the self before an audience, the description of which is

explicitly post-coital. (Reeve ends his account by remarking that both

he and his female companion "trembled like poplar leaves," held as

they were in Liszt's thrall.)

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 By the broad terms that would define the bourgeoisie, virtuoso

superstars like Franz Liszt were at once representative of a

hyperbolic form of bourgeois culture and, paradoxically, an alien,

perhaps alienated, opposite. Stated simply, Liszt and Liszt's music

represented an aesthetic correlative of the emerging middle class

(though he was much the darling of the aristocracy as well) and also

its radical opposite, however difficult it was then and now to pin

down precisely what this might mean.

Liszt performed during a period when aesthetics as a field of

philosophical inquiry was first defined and, so far as music is

concerned, widely discussed in journals published throughout

Western Europe in quite striking numbers. No small matter, for the

first time in Western history, the cultural pecking order of the arts

was rearranged so that music, formerly judged lesser than the textual

and visual arts, was awarded the prize of first place. Music was the

sonorous sign of inner life, and inner life was the sign of the

bourgeois subject, the much heralded, newly invented, and highly

idealized "individual." The European gold standard of the sonorous

inner life was, of course, quickly and generally established as

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Beethoven—a composer whom Liszt determinedly championed and

whose music he regularly played.

The sight of music has always been central to music's social

functions and meanings, xxv but sight's definitive relation to musical

semiotics was notably cemented in the course of the nineteenth

century with the full-bore mythic invention of absolute music as the

ultimate measure of aesthetic worth. More than ever before,

performers' bodies, in the act of realizing music, also helped to

transliterate musical sound into musical meaning by means of the

sight—and sometimes spectacle—of their gestures, facial expressions,

and general physicality. Liszt is the gold standard of this

phenomenon, possessing a "look" which he cultivated and exploited

as a performer. Implicitly, he understood that music was at once a

sonoric and a visual discourse, and he communicated to his

audiences by both means. Liszt was heard; Liszt—as he himself

clearly recognized—was also very much "looked at." Indeed, his

performances were sometimes described as being "watched," and not

simply heard. xxvi

The cultural semiotics of musical virtuosity were inscribed onto

25
performers bodies; the abstract quality of artistry and the paradoxical

immateriality of sonority itself were experienced and made concrete

by the presence of performers and their physicality in producing

sound. In "Those Who Are Carried Away" (Fig. 7), Gustave Doré's

acid caricature, otherwise-sober gentlemen are shown to have

surrendered to irrational musical enthusiasms; the act of looking is

transformed into a form of obsession, mesmerization, extreme

emotional release, and most important of all: desire, and what film

theory refers to as scopophilia. In many ways, music and the

emotional life it sanctioned represented the return of the repressed, a

release for nineteenth-century audiences, who had become

constrained by strict behavioral social codes. As Richard Sennett

points out, the romantic artist played an increasingly compensatory

role in the eyes of his audience, as a "person who really can express

himself and be free. Spontaneous expression is idealized in ordinary

life but [only] realized in the domain of art." xxvii Musicians literally

played out, in sight and sound, the exotic, sensual, and dramatic

fantasies of those seated before them.

During the course of the nineteenth century, musical

26
performance space was increasingly disciplined. As virtuoso display

reigned on stage, listening became more its opposite, namely,

quiescent—Peter Gay terms it "worshipful silence." xxviii In particular,

social standing, demonstrated in the concert hall, gradually was

defined within a framework of physical stasis and silence imposed by

the audience on itself, as a representation of an idealized identity.

For men in particular, listening increasingly occurred under self-

imposed conditions that discouraged demonstrable reaction,

especially if one made claims to being bourgeois. To behave

differently invited rebuke. Sennett states the matter well:

To sneer at people who showed their emotions at a play or

concert became de rigueur by the mid-19th Century. Restraint

of emotion in the theater became a way for middle-class

audiences to mark the line between themselves and the

working class"; xxix [and he adds] "To not show any reaction, to

cover up your feelings, means you are invulnerable, immune to

being gauche. In its dark aspect, as a mark of self-doubt,

silence was a correlative of 19th Century ethology. xxx

Liszt's bodily movements are visually recorded almost

27
exclusively in caricatures—as was the case for a number of other

nineteenth-century piano virtuosos. Liszt's public career coincided

with the beginnings of photography, well in advance of motion

photography. The sole technological means by which to "capture" his

physical freneticism was the then-dominant form of pictorial

hyperbole. That is, the generally recognized exaggeration of his

performance style was captured by a parallel hyperbolic form of

visual representation. Among the most striking is János Jankó's 1873

eight-frame caricature (Fig. 8) of a Liszt performance that

concentrates on the pianist's gestures, each provided with

explanatory text (which I’ll not cite). The caricature is rather like a flip

book of herky-jerky movements, the point being to make emphatic

the extremes of both movement and gesture for which Liszt was

famous, and which he knew to milk for their full worth. There’s

history at work here larger than the personal chronicle of a lone

musician to the extent that modernity is defined by movement,

change, and unpredictability. Liszt was the embodiment of the

dramatic presentism of his time: utterly au courant, the aesthetic

correlate of the early industrial revolution, and Taylorism, in advance

28
of itself, gone beyond measure. Caricature may satirize the role he

played; but it’s likewise clear that caricature simultaneously

promoted the very thing it sought to contain through belittlement.

With Liszt, the center doesn’t hold, all that’s solid melts into a

blur of gestural change; rational gravity gives way to sensual chaos:

a reverie, a decentered dream, a sonic-visual Rorschach blot. The

audience watches the self-decentering of the body of the artist-pianist

(who performs in every respect); the result is the decentering of the

audience itself, the loss self control via the so-named "mystical

ecstasy" diagnosed as the result of Liszt's 1840s concerts, xxxi even, so

it would seem, to the point of apparent stupefied exhaustion (Fig. 9).

It’s worth suggesting that the caricatured audiences drawn by Doré

are not fundamentally different from the photographs shot in the

1960s at various Beattles concerts (Fig 10), scenes to be sure that have

many times been repeated before and since.

The visual trope of musical centering and decentering has a

number of variations. The mass-produced prints by James Gillray

(1757-1815) satirizing the social climbing of the nouveau riche as

manifested in the aesthetic pretentiousness of would-be musicial

29
amateurs devoid of talent is a case in point. Gillray loosely adapts the

prestigious group-portrait type known as the conversation piece

popular during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Fig. 11)

wherein music serves visually to make emphatic abiding claims to

accomplishment, taste, leisure, and wealth. With Gillray (Fig. 12)

these qualities are entirely undercut by three complimentary means:

first, by a replacing the elegant and refined body types associated

with the upper social orders for lumpen ones, so as to emphasize a

degree of social climbing that hasn’t managed to overcome the

provincial heritage of what look like grotesque farmers in rented

costume; second, by twisting performers faces into grimaces that

suggest not aesthetic pleasure but brutal, miserable and clearly

unskilled labor; and third, by various obvious gestural grotesqueries.

These prints derive their meaning by means of the spatial, acoustic,

and visual distortion they reference: a world of ideal order

bastardized by the socially unworthy. Musical harmony, as metaphor

for social harmony, is ironically named in the titles supplied by

Gillray to each print, the titles being fully in keeping with a remark

by one Arthur Young, writing in the magazine Annals of Agriculture

30
in 1792. Noting his irritation at finding a pianoforte in a farmer’s

parlor, he confided: “I always with [it] was burnt.” xxxii

Late modernity has moved a long distance from the

instructional decorum of Molenaer’s valorization of mesure. The

extraordinary exaggeration common to Doré’s caricatures is a sign of

modernity: its excitement, its energy, and above all its extremes—

think Muybridge (Fig. 13). Doré’s exaggerations are likewise signs of

danger, of a brave new world as if afflicted with Tourettes, what

Agamben usefully described as “a generalized catastrophe of the

sphere of gestures.” xxxiii As Agemben points out, it’s hardly

coincidental that Muybridge’s work and the work of Gilles de la

Tourette are contemporaneous.

•••

The human body constitutes itself as a transfer point between

musical sound and musical meaning. One might say that the body is

a medium—a foundation or a ground—for musical knowing.

Sonority needs bodies not only for realizing sound but also for music

to make sense. In the absence of the sight of the body it seems

31
reasonable to say that the imagined body takes over.

Music and imagination, and music as imagination, are well-

established tropes in the thinking about music.

In the nineteenth century’s sometimes startling degree of self-

reflexivity concerning the nature of selfhood, the reverie—the

dream—was a quite common form of imaginative self-promotion for

identity measured by feeling xxxiv (Fig. 14). The representation of

musical dreams—dreams visualized so as to be viewed—are usually

as odd as they are evocative (Fig. 15). They evoke less actual musical

sound than what sound releases, at once weirdly concrete and

ghostlike: something like a present absence, and in any event

rampantly ineffable. In this regard, Barthes points out that "In

[actual]dreams, the sense of hearing is never solicited. The dream,”

he says, “is strictly a visual phenomenon, and it is by the sense of

sight that what is addressed to the ear will be perceived: a matter,

one might say, of acoustic images." xxxv

The dreaming Beethoven, as imagined in a pastel circa 1901,

remains closed to us and himself alike. Dressed rather more like Liszt

or Wagner, eyes closed, he seems lost to anyone but himself. We in

32
turn are provided access less to what he thinks than what his music

evokes, though whether to him or to us is a bit less certain. We’re

visually let in on the open romanticist secret. Beethoven isn’t so much

thinking as feeling and creating, and the dialectical relation between

the two terms is essentially fetishized. For viewers, and presumably

also for Beethoven, the result is beyond thought; it can be

experienced but not fathomed, and that of course is the pleasure of

the reverie, in this case an uncertain dream coded in sacred and

secular erotics. But in the end, it’s a private reverie, rolled up into the

imagination of the hunched over, inaccessible composer-performer.

We have access as staring voyeurs, acoustic Peeping Toms, as it were,

straining our ears for the sonoric signature that is Beethoven’s alone,

or so suggests the well-establish mythic foundation on which the

image depends. Were Beethoven’s body positioned otherwise, the

sexy specters at the left, rising from the soundboard would be jarring,

even illogical.

Beethoven is privatized by being hunched over, eyes shut,

making us irrelevant to his reverie, except of course for the fact that

what’s really public in the image is the fetishization of the composer’s

33
own self-privatizing gestural pose. The artist in this instance gestures

toward Beethoven precisely by absenting gesture. But all that

notwithstanding, we’re let in on what the late nineteenth century

marked as the sign “Beethoven”: namely, a genius whose

improvisatory keyboard meanderings could conjure up heaven and

earth. His sonic reverie evokes the crucified Christ floating in the

ether beneath whom rise a woman, experiencing orgasmic ecstasy,

and a naked man, almost certainly borrowed from Michelangelo,

another canonic aesthetic genius. External to the composer’s dream is

the world outside, visible through the open window framing

Beethoven’s profile. Even the natural world, however, falls to the

composer’s agency, as evident in the weirdly shaped and weirdly

colored clouds fashioned to evoke an expression of cosmic empathy,

a bit like the clouds that precede the celestial mother-ship in Close

Encounters of the Third Kind. Appearances in this painting, like

appearance in that film are intended to raise goose bumps: the body’s

involuntary memory sign of being duly moved.

Agamben points out that images reify and obliterate gesture; he

refers to the imago as death mask or symbol. But he also suggests out

34
that images preserve the dynamis of gesture intact (as in Muybridge’s

stop-motion photography, or a modern-day sports photo) (Fig. 16).

The frozen gestural dynamis, as Agamben puts it, “corresponds to the

image flashing in the epiphany of involuntary memory”—a phrase

that owes as much to Benjamin as to Proust. Agamben further

suggests that the gestural dynamis of the image “always refers beyond

itself to a whole of which it is a part,” here obviously enough

channeling Adorno. What Agamben invokes, in toto, is the historicity

of gesture, whether gesture itself or gesture frozen in

representation. xxxvi This collective insight leads Agamben to his

principal point, that gesture “opens the sphere of ethos as the more

proper sphere of that which is human.” xxxvii And with ethos, to be

sure, comes politics. With politics we have returned to Brecht and his

concept of social gest, and to the idea of gesture “intended as a

crystal of historical memory.” xxxviii In sum, then, and to quote

Agamben one last time, the gesture is “communication of a

communicability; . . . the gesture is essentially always a gesture of

not being able to figure something out in language,” xxxix and yet to

figure it out by other means, through the body’s sight acting out in

35
the face of worldly phenomena, in the instance before us today, the

immaterial materiality of musical sound (Fig. 17).

•••

I’ll close with a brief invocation of the relation of musical

gesture and utopian imaginings. In Philosophy of New Music, Adorno

calls music “a gestural art, closely akin to crying”; music, like crying,

addresses the reality of sorrow and seeks to reach beyond it toward

reconciliation. Here’s how he puts it:

Music and crying open the lips and bring delivery from

restraint. In tears and singing, the alienated world is entered.

“Tears pour, the earth has taken me back”—this is the gesture

of music. . . . The gesture of returning, not the feeling of

waiting, describes the expression of all music, even in a world

worthy of death. xl

The metaphors in play in this citation are anchored in an imagined

unity within the natural world, a utopian reconciliation of the most

fundamental, if distant, sort, upon which any imaginable form of

hope must build. xli In his last great work, Aesthetic Theory, Adorno

articulated what he regarded as music’s utopianism structured by the

36
reconciliation with otherness. His simple statement reads: “Music

says We directly, regardless of its intentions.” xlii Music’s gesture, for

Adorno, is an embrace. Adorno’s metaphor of embrace involves arms

that reach toward the other; consider the importance that singers

ascribe to the gesture of reaching out with their arms to audiences, a

gesture of supplication and regard, I suspect, as well as one that puts

to the body the task of “saying” what the text, musical and textual,

cannot manage on its own. Singers’ gestures reread music’s internal

knowledge for us to see. The gesture of reaching out is a mark of the

utopian quotient ascribed to music in a world increasingly devoid of

sufficient reasons easily to give oneself over to hopefulness.

Perhaps we might say that the often-irritating inescapability of

music today is more than the result of marketing schemes in

overdrive and as much the simultaneous reflection of the

increasingly desperate longing for whatever musical sonority points

towards: a promesse de bonheur. A promise defines the unrealized; it’s

the acknowledgement of unmet need. Stendahl, from whom Adorno

borrowed the phrase “promesse du bonheur,” articulated this point.

Music, he said, “as an art, suffuses the soul of man with sweet regret,

37
by giving it a glimpse of happiness; and a glimpse of happiness, even if

it is no more than a dream of happiness, is almost the dawning of

hope.” xliii But the dream must be known; in a word, it must not only

be heard but also be thought. Gestures think music, and the gestures

are several: those internal to the music (music’s immanent processes),

those congruent with music’s realization (performance, through

which we experience the hermeneutics of realization), and, finally,

those we see (bodies in action, or in frozen action, in the case of the

image). Music’s knowability is real, but in degrees that are uncertain

and unstable. In the end, and in the apt words of Larry Kramer,

“Musical meaning does not depend on being decoded; it depends on

being lived.” xliv The stakes of musical knowing are considerable to

the extent that music may encode an otherness, an alternative, to

dystopian realities of lived experience. Music is lived through the

body. The body’s gestures are by no means the least sign of the social

and cultural urgency to which music responds.

38
iTheodor W. Adorno, “On Some Relationships between Music and Painting,” trans. Susan
Gillespie, Musical Quarterly 79 no. 1 (Spring1995), p. 66.

iiTheodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 180.

iii Theodor W. Adorno, “The Radio Symphony,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 255.

ivRoland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” in Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 73.

v Ibid., pp. 73-74.

vi Some years ago Molenaer's picture was the subject of an important essay by the art historian P.
J. J. van Thiel, "Marriage Symbolism in a Musical Party by Jan Miense Molenaar," Simiolus 2/2
(1967-68), pp. 90-99, from which I have here borrowed freely.

Emblems, commonly published in large collections, consist of an image accompanied by a

vii

verbal gloss. Emblem illustrations, sans text, found their way into the cultural vocabulary of
other discursive practices like painting (and, indeed, music). See further John Landwehr, Emblem
and Fable Books Printed in the Low Countries, 1542-1813: A Bibliography (Utrecht: HES Publishers,
1988); Eddy de Jongh, Zinne- en minnebeelden in de schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw (Antwerp:
Openbare Kunstbezit in Vlaanderen, 1967); and Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century
Imagery, 2nd ed. (Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura, 1964).

viiiVan Thiel, "Marriage Symbolism," p. 99. The visual antithesis to the temperance emblem is the
servant at the left peering into the jug. He is a kannekijker, that is a tippler; in emblematic
literature such a figure commonly signifies gluttony (p. 93). On the uniqueness of the monkey-
cat representation see pp. 95-96. The "domestic" enclosure at the right, conceivably but not likely
the representation of a real dwelling, is a symbolic fortress of the marriage vows; it is
metaphorically mirrored on the painting's left by the ivy-covered wall topped off by two pots of
carnations. Van Thiel describes the emblematic associations; the wall alludes to the husband, the
ivy to the wife, and the flowers to fidelity; see pp. 98-99. For more on the broad range of symbols
conventionally employed in Dutch marriage portraiture, see David R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock:
Seventeenth-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), pp.
57-89.

ixQuoted from Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in
the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 400.

x See Simon Schama, "Wives and Wantons: Versions of Womanhood in 17th Century Dutch Art,"
Oxford Art Journal 3 no. 1 (April 1980), 5-13; "Woman, as the incarnation of caprice, vulnerable to
the enticements of the world, had to be confined within a system of moral regulation. ... (W)omen
in Dutch art were immediately encumbered with a massive baggage of secondary associations
concerning their duties in the home and towards their husband. ... These took the form of a
comprehensive inventory of symbols and visual allusions. ... Planted conspicuously in the middle

39
of genre paintings, or portraits, they turned ostensibly anecdotal subject matter into visual
disquisitions on human frailty" (p. 7). The essay also includes information on misogynist
literature, though much fuller treatment of this topic is provided in Schama, Embarrassment of
Riches, pp. 445-54.

xi "The home was of supreme importance in determining the moral fate, both of individuals and

of Dutch society as a whole. ... In other words, the home was the irreducible primary cell on
which, ultimately, the whole fabric of the commonwealth was grounded." Schama,
Embarrassment of Riches, pp. 384, 386. See also Wayne E. J. Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and
Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1995.

It is not to be automatically assumed, however, that a Dutch wife felt compelled to define
xii

herself precisely in the terms set out by her husband. Though prevailing ideologies of gender
and domestic relations in Holland were not different from those of the rest of Western Europe,
during the seventeenth century foreign visitors commonly remarked, usually critically, on the
freedoms enjoyed by Dutch women. See further, Schama, "Wives and Wantons," passim, and
Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, pp. 402-04, 420-27.

The seriousness of sitters in portraits is of course conventional, for precisely the reasons I am
xiii

suggesting, without regard to whether musical activities are included. Such seriousness,
however, is antithetical to Dutch Merry Company scenes, including those with musicians like
Molenaer's lutenist.

See Alan Durant, Conditions of Music (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984),
xiv

passim; Christopher Small, Music - Society - Education (New York: Schirmer, 1980), pp. 60-96; and
Richard Norton, The History of Western Tonality: A Critical and Historical Perspective (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984), pp. 138-230.

xvNo one argued this point more effectively than Theodor W. Adorno. See, for example,
Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1976). See also
the famous formulation by Adorno's sometime colleague at the Frankfurt Institute, Herbert
Marcuse, "The Affirmative Character of Culture" (1937), in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory,
trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1968), pp. 88-133.

See Thomas J. Csórdas, “Somatic Modes of Attention,” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 2 (1993),
xvi

135-56.

xvii Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(New York: Pantheon, 1982).
xviii Joy H. Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 43. Brecht’s

articulation of gestus first appeared in 1930 with regard to his collaboration with Kurt Weill on
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. See p. 47.

Norman Bryson, "In Medus'a Gaze," in In Medusa's Gaze: Still Life Paintings from
xix

Upstate New York Museums, ed. Bernard Barryte, (Rochester: Memorial Art Gallery of the
University of Rochester, 1991), p. 7.

xxRichard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 110,
112-13.

40
 Kaja Silverman, "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical
xxi

Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986),
pp. 139-52.
xxii
The opening line in Peter Gay, The Naked Heart: Victoria to Freud, vol. 4 of The Bourgeois
Experience (New York, 1995), p. 3. See pp. 11-35 for a summation of the emergence of
bourgeois "inner life" and its relation to music and listening practices. Regarding the pre-
history to the period of my concern, see William Weber, "Did People Listen in the 18th
Century?," Early Music 23, no. 4 (November 1997), pp. 678-91.
xxiii
The Musical World 20 (28 August 1845), p. 269.

xxiv John Knox Laughton, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D. C.
L., 2 vols. (London 1898), vol. 1, p. 49.
xxv
See Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the
Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993).

For an example, see James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley
xxvi

and Los Angeles, 1995), p. 232.

xxvii
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New
York, 1978), p. 191.
xxviii
Gay, The Naked Heart, p. 18.

xxix Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 206. According to Sennett (p. 207), disciplined

silence was foremost a phenomenon of urban centers, less so provincial outposts. As he

further notes, the dimming of house lights, which began in the 1850's and was virtually
universal by the 1890's, contributed to audience self-restraint.
xxx
Ibid., p. 210. See also Gay, The Naked Heart, pp. 18-19.
xxxi
Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847, rev ed. (Ithaca, 1988), pp.
289-90.

xxxii Annals of Agriculture 17 (1792), p. 73.

Giorgio Agamben, "Notes on Gesture," in Means Without Ends (Minneapolis: University of

xxxiii

Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 51. My thanks to my colleague, Cesare Casarino, for drawing my
attention to this text.

For more on the place of the dream or reverie in nineteenth-century European culture, see
xxxiv

Michelle Perrot, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), pp.
512-18.

Roland Barthes, "Listening," The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and
xxxv

Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), p. 257.

41
xxxvi Agamben, "Notes on Gesture," p. 55.

xxxvii Ibid., p. 57.

xxxviii Ibid., p. 54.

xxxix Ibid., p. 59.

xlTheodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 99. The internal quotation is from Goethe, Faust, I, line
784.

Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music,” in

xli

Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), pp. 135-61,
traces this same connection.

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert
xlii

Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) p. 167.

Stendahl [Henri Beyle], Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe (Seattle: University of
xliii

Washington Press, 1972), p. 347, original emphasis.

Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press,
xliv

2007), p. 8.

42