Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture

By David Schwarz

Book Overview

In Listening Subjects, David Schwarz uses psychoanalytic techniques to probe the visceral experiences of music listeners. Using classical, popular, and avant-garde music as texts, Schwarz addresses intriguing questions: why do bodies develop goose bumps when listening to music and why does music sound so good when heard "all around?" By concentrating on music as cultural artifact, Listening Subjects shows how the historical conditions under which music is created affect the listening experience.
Schwarz applies the ideas of post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists Slavoj Zizek, Julia Kristeva, and Kaja Silverman to an analysis of diverse works. In a discussion of John Adams's opera Nixon in China, he presents music listening as a fantasy of being enclosed in a second skin of enveloping sound. He looks at the song cycles of Franz Schubert as an examination and expression of epistemological doubts at the advent of modernism, and traverses fantasy "space" in his exploration of the white noise at the end of the Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)." Schwarz also considers the psychosexual undercurrent in Peter Gabriel's "Intruder" and the textual and ideological structures of German Oi Musik. Concluding with a reading of two compositions by Diamanda Gal s, he reveals how some performances can simultaneously produce terror and awe, abjection and rage, pleasure and displeasure. This multilayered study transcends other interventions in the field of musicology, particularly in its groundbreaking application of literary theory to popular and classical music.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822319225
• ISBN13: 9780822319221
• Release Date: June 1997
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Music as Psychoanalytic Phantasy

David Schwartz's volume "Listening Subjects" is a collection of readings of both Western Classical and Western Popular music in terms of psychoanalytic theory. Specifically its an adaption of Slavoj Zizek's pop culture adaptation of Jacques Lacan's version of psychoanalysis. For David Schwartz, listening is the process of unpacking the "musical-theoretical, musical-historical, cultural, psychoanalytic, and personal dimensions"---listening is both a fantasy thing and a fantasy space. The "thingness" we hear in listening is produced as structural elements in a musical piece are related to each other--this is a function of composition and performance. The "spaceness" is produced when embedded cultural thresholds that make structural elements possible are crossed or exposed in a subject. In other words, space is produced as a function of reception and internal interaction with qualities of the subject. As consistent with psychoanalytic theory--both of these illusory products--thingness and space----are retrospective and illusory since there can be no unmediated "immannent" access to events that structured our subjectivity or historical contexts. 'There ain't no goin' home.' You can't go back to the womb, since after your Oedipal complex is resolved you can only seek failed substitutions for the mother over time. Schwartz postulates music as sonorous envelope and acoustic mirror....being enveloped by music is a fantasy---a representation of an experience to which no one could have direct access. When enveloped in listening, the body's self-perceptual boundaries can temporarily collapse, leading to the formation of an "archaic body"--less bounded from the external world than the genuine body. This ocean is a womb fantasy--being at home with the "touch, smell, and voice of the mother..."shortly after birth, Appropriating Lacan, Schwartz notes this as the acoustic-mirror stage, in which the infant tries to match its voice to the mother. The threshold-crossing aspects of music (like when you get goosebumps, and your body's boundaries start to fuzz out) reacts with your own history of threshold-crossing events, much like transitioning from the mirror stage to the Symbolic Order, to produce distant reconstructions of these psychoanalytic moments. For Schwartz, all this is especially true of what is often called the new minimalism--such as John Adams, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and so forth. Minimalist music often combines repeated eighth note or sixteenth note ostinatoes with pitch content drawn from "traditional harmonies of the Canon--particularly the semitonal voice leading of the German tradition of the mid-nineteenth century. Archaic yet familiar is the relationship here. Accompanying figuration rises to the primary space, rather than the secondary. As examples, Schwatrz cites the Steve Reich / Kronos Quartet's Different Trains (a personal favorite as well). In that piece, Violas initiate pitched phrases, which are then taken over by voice--ind