Leo Tolstoy tried very hard not to like music, but he could not help liking Chopin.* 'While I listened', he said, 'I became as one with Chopin; I felt as if I had composed the piece myself: (Marek and Gordon-Smith 1978, p. 246). This type of statement is not unusual, so it is easy to overlook how remarkable it actually is. Tolstoy likes Chopin because Chopin gives him a new identity that is both thoroughly other and fully his, Tolstoy's, own: as if at one with Chopin, no longer himself, he feels as if he, himself, had composed the piece. The music goes right to the core of the listener's subjectivity, and it does so regardless of its own subjective content, which Tolstoy does not specify, as he hardly could, since he does not even bother to specify the piece. The relationship between Tolstoy and Chopin cannot be independent of the latter as the exemplar of a certain style or sound, but it arises, not 'from' that 'Chopin' as a source, but in the dynamic interaction between the music here understood as the surrogate for its composer, in other contexts for its performer and the subject as listener. What are the wider implications of Tolstoy's remark? Most obviously, it points to music as a site of subjective mobility or negotiation, and in so doing raises the general question of the relationship between music and subjectivity. In its indifference to 'content', it locates that question not in the field of expression but in that of action, dialogue, cultural and psychological work. The remark is obviously historyand culture-bound, but to the extent that people today still tune their sense of self to music a very large extent, if the ongoing struggles between internet software and the music industry is any signthe history and culture are still binding a hundred or more years after Tolstoy, as they were a hundred or more years before. This stretch of history, roughly deElned, is the one that opens the possibility that music may have a formative, as opposed to a merely practical

The Mysteries of Animation: History, Analysis and Musical Subjectivity

Making sound is characteristic of agency in the natural world. It is curious therefore that having separated pitched sound from nature as much as possible—disciplined it into scales, temperaments, etc.—Western music has for centuries made extraordinary efforts to imitate natural sounds and processes with this un-natured sound. Whereas music often depicts nature, “music” has become abstract and transparent, and musical sounds themselves have become little more than acoustic tokens of objects related by structure. Any metaphorical connections with extra-musical sounds are suppressed in discourse about music because they constitute “effects.” In this article, I interpret the first movement of George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children (1970) as an expression of agency in the soundscape, considering vocal sounds, especially those attributed to crickets, as acts in a vocal ecology rather than imitation of natural sounds for programmatic purposes. My analysis invites us to hear this music—and music in general—as acoustic expression in a soundscape and therefore in ecological terms.

The Vocal Ecology of Crumb's Crickets

ResumeLa question de savoir comment l’Iliade et l’Odyssee ont ete ecrites s’est posee des l’Antiquite. Le present article parcourt quelques-unes des reponses qui lui ont ete apportees a l’epoque moderne. Pour l’abbe d’Aubignac, qui ecrivait au milieu du xviie siecle, Homere n’avait jamais existe, et les ouvrages transmis sous son nom n’etaient qu’un amas de pieces auparavant dispersees. On ne cessa pourtant pas dans les siecles suivants d’ecrire des « vies » d’Homere, ou du moins de brosser des portraits d’Homere au travail. Pour Giambattista Vico, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Wood, et plus tard Milman Parry et Albert Lord, Homere n’etait pas un homme de plume mais un barde sans doute illettre, ce qui en faisait un poete superieur a tous ceux qui lui avaient succede : la ou d’autres ecrivaient, lui chantait. Cette valorisation nostalgique des cultures de la voix, beaucoup de specialistes de la litterature orale la feraient leur encore aujourd’hui.

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Quelques jours de la vie d'Homère

George Crumb prefaces the score to An Idyll for the Misbego en with a note identifying humankind as the “misbego#en,” rulers of an environmentally “dying world.” Crumb’s piece responds to these thoughts by evoking the “voice of nature.” To have a voice is to have acoustic agency, to have one’s presence acknowledged and heard. In this article, I explore what it means for nature and music to have voice in this sense, and how Crumb’s Idyll may be heard to sing in nature’s voice. I investigate the role played in the work by a quotation of Debussy’s Syrinx, pertinent themes of voice and nature in the tales of Syrinx and Io by the Roman poet Ovid, and the aesthetic tendencies of American ecological thought, represented by Aldo Leopold. I show how Crumb subtly acknowledges the inseparability of culture and environmental impact, while simultaneously summoning listeners out into a soundscape in which Nature’s voices speak. Volume 23, Number 1, March 2017 Copyright © 2017 Society for Music Theory The nymph, content to use two legs again, Now walked erect, yet still afraid to speak Lest, cow-like, she might moo, and timorously Essayed the syllables so long disused. (Ovid 1986, 23) [1] The nymph is Io, a nature spirit, daughter of the river god Inachus. She was raped by Jove, then transformed into a heifer to hide her identity from Juno, and is now restored to her proper form. We will contemplate Io’s fate in more detail below. At present it is enough to note that, though she is able to speak again, she is afraid to do so, having been silenced for so long. Though Io’s voice is no longer silenced, no longer suppressed, this voice of nature is now repressed. [2] George Crumb prefaces the score to his flute and percussion composition An Idyll for the

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Nature’s Voice in Crumb’s An Idyll for the Misbegotten

Orphic revenge: the limits of language for a semiotics of religion

We need a new word. We want a disciplinary designation different from "musicology," one that might unsettle rather than confirm our easiest assumptions about song and its place in our lives and thought. Perhaps "cantology" would do, or "carmenology"-more euphonious but unhappily conjuring habaneras and gypsies-or yet again "melology," for those fussy about mixing Latin and Greek roots. Any of these alternatives would remove "music" from its place of honor in the customary designation. All might serve to remind us that music signifies not an ideologically neutral, cross-cultural array of sounding phenomena but rather a constructed cultural category-one indeed that is, as we delimit it, and viewed against the long historical durde, recent and local. The problem with "music" is one familiar to us from other naturalized constructs. It tends to stand outside our thought, directing it but inaccessible. Music's transparency gives it power to determine our discourse while remaining invisible to it. In this it operates together with another construct, the aesthetic, that emerged in the eighteenth century just as music (again, the cultural category) was attaining its modern form. Together, aesthetics and music came, across the 1700s, to cast a new light on concepts hallowed in the West-beauty, for example, or the sublime. Together they informed a new conception of emotion expressed in new terms such as sentiment, sensibility, and Empfindsamkeit. Together still, a century later, they underwrote a fundamental articulation in European thought that could, at its culminating moment in Schopenhauer, the early Nietzsche, and Wagner, encompass in music metaphysical or transcendental realms all told. (Kant, little moved by the music of his day, would not have relished this outcome of his Copernican revolution.) Something of this musical conditioning of metaphysics is still reflected in the academy today, in the (usually) respectful puzzlement the activities of music scholars elicit from colleagues in other-even closely related-disciplines. Musical metaphysics is much more evident still, through many levels of nonacademic culture, in the distinctive rever-

Gary Tomlinson

Papers

Vico’s Songs: Detours at the Origins of (Ethno)Musicology