A new volume on contemporary music, edited by Max Paddison and Irène Deliège, comprises essays by scholars and composers, all of whom are affiliated with an institution of higher learning (as noted parenthetically in the following list). The threats to these and indeed all institutes of higher learning in Europe and North America are at root much the same as those facing contemporary music as it is understood here. No discussion of contemporary music can ignore that fact.

The contributors are: Anne Boissière (University of Lille), Pierre Boulez, Pascal Decroupet (Sophia Antipolis University, Nice), the late Célestin Deliège, Hugues Dufourt (CNRS Université Paris I), Brian Ferneyhough (Stanford University), Lois Fitch (Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester), Rudolf Frisius (Pädagogische Hochschule, Karlsruhe), John Hails (Napier University, Edinburgh), the late Jonathan Harvey (Oxford and Sussex Universities), Abigail Heathcote (University of Paris VIII), Marc Jimenez (University of Paris I), Helmut Lachenmann (Fromm Visiting Professor, Harvard University), Richard McGregor (University of Cumbria), François Nicolas (École Normale Supérieure, Paris), Wolfgang Rihm (Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, Karlsruhe), Richard Toop (University of Sydney), David Walters (Marmura University, Istanbul), and Alastair Williams (Keele University). Max Paddison is attached to the University of Durham, and his co-editor Irène Deliège to the University of Liège. The present volume is a revised and expanded English edition of a collection published in French in 2001, hence almost half the contributions are by scholars based in France or Belgium. Which diminishes the problem of serious music and higher learning not a bit.

The book is divided into three parts, with an introduction by the editors and a ‘postlude’ by Williams. The first part, ‘Theoretical Perspectives and Retrospectives’, encompasses a truly wide spectrum of music theory. To give but a sample: Hugues Dufourt, in ‘The Principles of Music and the Rationalization of Theory’, joins historiography to cognitive psychology as a basis for present-day musical culture, whose principal characteristic is what he calls ‘the search for sonic illusion’. To do so, he examines the mechanics of music (music under the aegis of the ‘physics of inertia’ in the work of Christian Huygens, Fourier, Euler, Bernoulli, and Helmholtz, among others). He finds this mechanics devoid of ‘logical, linguistic and even less philosophical formalism’ (but in doing so, I believe, he chooses to ignore the aesthetics of mechanics). In lieu of mechanics he turns to what he calls ‘spectral music’, musical forms in which science combines afresh with art to reintroduce aesthetics. Dufourt's aesthetics abandons totality – at least the totality of an all-explanatory mechanics. In this regard theory reintroduces itself where technology fails (presumably where technology fails to realize totality, though this is nowhere stated clearly). Music theory's task is thus formal: to account for technology's failure. Musical timbre is key, as is the work of Jean-Claude Risset, based as it is upon a spectral rationalism of timbre in growth and decay.

Dufourt's most useful conclusion is a ‘functional aesthetics’, an aesthetic approach to music that recognizes a qualitative complexity in lieu of a simplifying quantitative mechanics. In truth, this complexity is not sonic ‘illusion’ as Dufourt would claim; it is sonic reality, a reality made all the more real by threats to its existence. Given the waxing totality of MacWorld (hamburgers or computers, what's the difference?), sonic reality would suggest that qualitative musical complexity is losing out to modes of production based on the quantitative simplicity of a global music industry. This leads – has led – to the demise of logical, linguistic, and even philosophical formalism. If there is no discrepancy between artistic labour and artistic capital, then the world lacks artistic form; this, at least, we learned from Adorno. Perhaps it is out of style to say so in France, but by alluding to Weber (in lieu of Adorno), Dufourt implies as much (about politics, not France). His conclusion cannot be read as anything but political (although Dufourt will not admit to this openly): ‘Musical logic is based on the power of differentiation dependent upon the acceptance of asymmetry in the establishment of structural formulae: orientation, polarization, pressure and corrosion’ (47). Let us be a little clearer here: industrial convergence has led to the symmetry of the mp3 format, which by its very compression replaces the qualitative differentiation of musical sounds with mere quantitative identity. Consider iTunes' Genius, which does the qualitative thinking for you.

Not everything in this part is so transparently political. Particularly worthy of note here are two essays by the late Célestin Deliège. The first of these, a quite singular essay on atonal harmony, is breathtaking in its premise, to ‘“riemannize” chromatic harmony […] to bestow a fundamental on any aggregate in atonal music, and thus to propose a figured harmony, just as was done for basso continuo in the past’ (52). To accomplish this, the author draws upon the overtone system in a way reminiscent of Hindemith's work; thus he produces an approach to the classification of atonal harmonies quite unlike anything in modern theory (certainly unlike David Lewin's work, which the author cites). The second essay is not so much a history of serious music ‘post-Webern’ as a historiography, a prescription for writing the history of recent serious music – again in Deliège's singular style, quite unlike any other account of the period or its problems of periodization.

Of the remaining essays in this part some are succinct, for example Richard Toop's ‘“I Open and Close”?’, which examines beginnings and endings in Ferneyhough. Some are sprawling, Dufourt's in particular. What these chapters attest is a field (dare I say a European ‘tradition’) characterized by a certain freedom in music theory: Dufourt's qualitative distinctions. This is a freedom to a great extent lost in North American music theory, with the advent of large theory classes for the generalist; the putatively ‘all-encompassing’ undergraduate music theory text; the hothouse graduate-student culture of the Ivy League universities; and the grand totalizing systems of music theory, Schenkerian and set-theoretic. While there remains free theoretical speculation in North America, it is at best pressed to the margins by a textbook publishing industry aimed at the large populace of undergraduate musicians, for whom an accessory training in music theory – theory ‘lite’ – is a requirement of their baccalaureate. Hence the crisis of higher education, in music and elsewhere. The metaphor of fast food is not inaccurate.

The third part of the book comprises essays and interviews with well-noted contemporary composers: Boulez, Ferneyhough, Lachenmann, Rihm, and Harvey. Again the freedom of thought is noteworthy, be it Harvey's evocation of Buddhism as a tool in the description of his music or the ease with which Ferneyhough turns aside what could have been a tempting but perhaps facile alliance of music and philosophy offered him by the interviewer. Speaking with Abigail Heathcote, Lachenmann fairly bubbles with exuberance. While describing the apparent incomprehension of his music on the part of Parisian audiences, the composer breathes vibrancy: ‘Well, usually the booing on one side provokes ovations from the other’ (332). He recounts an episode when, met with laughter and other forms of disturbance while performing his piano pieces Ein Kinderspiel, he interrupted the performance, announced that he would start again, and was met with respectful silence. This calls to mind the anecdote of a Boulez Rite of Spring with the Cleveland Orchestra at a pleasant afternoon's ‘tea concert’. Faced with the clinking of china all through the performance, after a tepid ovation, Boulez returned to conduct the Rite a second time, to utter silence. This is ‘taking the music to the people’. To return again to Dufourt: these kinds of compositional and performance acts are a confrontation, an acknowledgement of the asymmetry between audience and composer; gestures of this sort restore an asymmetry in a society where the consumer in the guise of audience would seek a simple symmetry between composer and listener, a simplistic symmetry based on the commodity relation.

One's attention is drawn here to freedom of thought, and again to the politics of higher learning. As the list of institutional associations above would suggest, the freedom of thought at work in this book is essentially an academic freedom, unbridled by market forces. All the contributors to this section of the volume are at the very least closely associated with universities or colleges, which by their stability allow such a freedom of thought. Ergo, the politics of higher learning becomes by default the politics of writing, and writing about, contemporary music.

While neither the first nor the third part of the book will acknowledge politics explicitly (though it is not hard to discern its implicit presence), the second part of the book is clearly about the politics of musical freedom. Even so, the declaration of musical freedom, like the elephant in the room, could be lost on the myopic. The firmest assertion is Paddison's:

Not exactly storming the Bastille, but it will do. Paddison declares that somehow, through some largely opaque process, a kind of musical freedom (to which the other parts of the book attest) has disappeared. Freedom has been replaced with the aural equivalent of the T-shirt, with Che Guevara's portrait stencilled on its chest: freedom as Benetton's rainbow of fabric colours.

The spirit moving ostensibly behind Part 2 is Adorno, its subtitle being ‘Philosophical Critiques and Speculations after Adorno’. But it is perhaps too polite to tread firmly in his heels. Herman Sabbe's ‘A Philosophy of Totality’ is quite out of place here. It lacks any trace, even a whimsical awareness, of the politics that cling to the term totality.Footnote ¹ In fact, when read in quite the opposite of what would seem to be Sabbe's intent, it makes perfect sense. When Sabbe characterizes Schoenberg's ‘atonality’ as ‘free from all deductive logic, of all linear causality’ (177), we cannot but disagree. Surely Schoenberg's choice of a method of pitch arrangement without relation to one single tonal term of reference was logical in the extreme. He deduced this avoidance of tonic logically from his understanding of harmony as linear causality (encoded in the voice-leading chapters of the Harmonielehre). So-called ‘atonality’ is the logical consequent to tonality, the logical antipode to the linear causality of Sechter and Bruckner's ‘law of the shortest way’ in voice leading. Atonality must have tonality; the two are necessary parts of a whole in which the former mediates the latter. In short, to have a totality one needs at least a modicum of distinction between parts. The possibility that atonality might complement the false totality of bourgeois music seems lost on Sabbe. And yet that would seem to be the nub of Adorno's Schoenberg critique. Schoenberg's music is the logical counterbalance to the total vacuum of bourgeois music: it is the factor that makes bourgeois music part of an authentic whole. This fact is diminished not one whit by Adorno's accusation of naïveté on Schoenberg's part. Wittingly or otherwise, Schoenberg created the very style by which the totalizing aspirations of bourgeois music are subordinated to a grander totality. Since the bourgeois listener's mind stubbornly resists encompassing this distinction, it follows that class consciousness and the import of Schoenberg's music are thus made crystal clear to him – to Mahler's sublimely intuitive ‘jackass’, as Adorno describes him in the Schoenberg essay in Prisms.Footnote ² The lengths to which Sabbe extends his all-encompassingly homogenized totality are breathtaking: ‘The Philosophy of Totality manifests itself in absence as in presence, in emptiness as in plenitude, in Nothingness as in Totality – Nothingness being the rejection of all rejections, which is to say, the acceptance of all and everything’ (180). The presence of this nonsense in a section entitled ‘after Adorno’ is inexplicable.

So, too, François Nicolas's quest for a ‘work-immanent’ musical logic lacks entirely that calculus of the political along the lines of which immanence is assessed after Adorno. Nicolas's essay is nonetheless fascinating in its own right. It postulates a musical autonomy in some detail by rethinking the dialectic as a ‘non-classical’ form, that is to say a dialectic based in a form of identity. If this is meant to link with Adorno's notions of musical immanence and autonomy, however, the link is quite unclear.

The link to Adorno in the three remaining essays is quite clear, fortunately. Max Paddison's ‘Music and Social Relations: towards a Theory of Mediation’ takes up again its author's fruitful occupation with the concepts of mediation and immediacy, and explicitly with that of totality after Adorno. In essence, musical totality is difficult to grasp (given that music evolves through time), but mediation works to render totality explicit. First, music ‘is mediated in itself as autonomous, hermetically sealed’. But second, music is a structure ‘socially mediated because musical material is itself socially mediated […] and it is also mediated historically, in that all possibilities are not available at any particular historical moment, so that a work is also a response to its time, its present’ (274). I think this says what Dufourt will not bring himself to say: mechanistic science would suggest that music is not subject to linguistic, logical, or even philosophical form; but a science of music that admits of gradation cannot deny the role of the social and the historical.

Marc Jimenez's ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Risk’ proposes an aesthetic that will not conform. In lieu of a passive European aesthetic tradition his goal is an aesthetic more in keeping with the activist elements in liberal ‘democracies’:

Jimenez's essay is frankly political. It calls to mind Adorno's practical criticism, ‘solidly based on analysis, commentary, criticism and interpretation of works of art’ and founded on a determination of ‘how deeply society and history are embedded in artworks, in material and in historical methods’ (252). Its weakness, however, is to dismiss all too readily the analytic philosophy of art (Arthur Danto and Nelson Goodman on the American side; Gérard Genette, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, and Yves Michaud on the French side). If the aim of analytic philosophy is unsympathetic to the philosophy of the Left, its methods should not be entirely disregarded. For the analytics too have a concern with the detail and method of art and art criticism, concerns that can be well integrated into a political consciousness of art when framed in light of Paddison's description of mediation.

The real gem of the collection, however, is Anne Boissière's ‘Material Constraints: Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt’. Boissière is, unfortunately, not well known in North America (I cannot speak for the United Kingdom), but deserves to be read widely. While a large part of the essay is generously given over to the ideas of Benjamin and Arendt, the frame in which they are put is clearly original, strikingly so. Her object is musical material in Adorno's thought, but her approach sets to one side the question of the history of material and the notion that material is something to be experimented with from a subjective stance. She is after a notion of material grounded in a community of understanding.

This is a welcome corrective to the exaltation of the composer's subjectivity, the Beethoven effect, to which so much contemporary music and contemporary music criticism succumbs (driven, unfortunately, by the self-aggrandizing tendency of Schoenberg, which his pupils turned into an ideology of new music). The principal implication of her thought is musical form: form derives from a ‘community of shared values’ and not in spite of such a community, as some avant-garde apologists are wont to proclaim. Implicit here is a separate aspect of Boissière's work on Adorno, the resistance in his thought to what she calls ‘the period of the avant-garde and to the direction taken today by the ideology of postmodernism’ (230), which she says she has dealt with elsewhere (but for which she does not provide a citation). The basis of this resistance is ‘the problem of the non-differentiation of the material’, that in the ruptured avant garde with its postulate of new material fecundity there is in fact ‘little material available for actual composition, that is to say, for creation’ (230). I hope to do Boissière's thought justice by projecting here: the avant garde believed it had stumbled upon a new richness of musical material. But in denying its relationship to a vital community, it was constrained merely to stumble upon itself.

At work here is a subtle notion of poietics. The work of art ‘works’: it acts rather than being worked upon, being acted upon. Boissière resurrects the categories of use and exchange value: the subject of Adorno's aesthetics is the use value of art, the aspect of musical work and material that cannot be exchanged. The avant garde and the postmoderns, however, eradicate use value by letting the musical mind roam with total freedom over musical material (‘an extreme individuation with respect to the work's language’), exchanging materials freely without reference to any fixed value grounded in artistic work, useful artistic action. This illusion of freedom destroys the characteristics that distinguish one work of art from another. If anything can be pawned off as material for music (everything being equal), then nothing is musical (bikinis and Beethoven, as Adorno saidFootnote ³). If everything in music is subject to the same levelling context of exchange (iTunes again leaps to mind), then what's the use? Being everything to everyone, music loses its vital connection to community and thus its distinguishing identity. Casting aside use value, totality becomes total mush.

Boissière proposes that musical material as a poetic material should show individuating traces – the particular imprint of its making – and not let these poetic fingerprints be dissolved by transformation into an exchange value that would reduce everything artistic to the common denominator, PayPal cash. The implication this has for mediation is considerable: musical material is not mediated by composers (or critics) working upon it. Instead it will mediate itself, thank you, by carrying the imprint of its creation, an imprint that will not be dissolved or smoothed over for purposes of exchange. To press her point, Boissière enters new territory beyond the pale of Adorno's thought, specifically the notion of the ‘plurality of music’, by which she means, I believe, the aspect of music that will not allow itself to be homogenized, to be folded into a specious totality, into exchange value. To accomplish this she turns to Benjamin and Arendt. From Benjamin's opposition of the novel and the story (taken from his essay ‘The Storyteller’ of 1936Footnote ⁴) she derives a useful opposition of subjectivity and objectivity. On the subjective side stands the novelist who writes a self-contained life (and with him the ‘voracious’ musical avant gardist for whom everything that can be seen and touched is material for art). On the objective side stands the storyteller's continuity with the tradition of the story – stands, in other words, the raconteur, who ‘recounts’ a story and, in doing so, leaves fingerprints upon the recounting. Implicit here is a composer who aligns himself with a craft of composition and with musical material that ‘recounts’ the material story of music (not necessarily historical materialism). In doing so, this kind of composer addresses the continuity of musical creation, its context, its ‘community’, to use Boissière's term. (In this regard Adorno's essays on Mahler and Berg and therein ‘the idea of a material that is regressive and anachronistic’ (232) are merely extreme cases: Mahler and Berg acknowledge explicitly the context of a modern musical community, where other composers might do so in less explicit form.)

Boissière's debt to Arendt is even more subtle. It turns upon the distinction between work and labour. Productive work entails presumably the use value of work, that aspect of doing that accomplishes something. (Again Boissière turns to poietics.) Unproductive labour, labour in this sense bound up with commodification for exchange, accomplishes nothing (and merely diminishes itself as profit becomes an added value). This is set beautifully in a quotation from Ricoeur's preface to Arendt's La condition de l'homme moderne: ‘When considered as starting from the world, the products of work – and not those of labour – guarantee permanence and durability, without which there would be no possible world at all’ (239). Arendt carries this further to focus upon the individual in light of the community (thus framing subjectivity). In Boissière's words:

‘The privacy of his body, removing him from the public domain.’ This is the solipsism that Adorno levels as an accusation against Schoenberg throughout the Prisms essay: that Schoenberg, with his putative ‘Supreme Commander’ whispering in his ear, is a compositional island.Footnote ⁶ It is an accusation that can be levelled against the avant garde; Adorno said it thus: ‘the arbitrariness of a radicalness for which nothing is any longer at stake’.Footnote ⁷ We might level the same accusation against university administrators who see professors as labourers rather than workers, and thus transform the profession of teaching into a job category like any other on campus.

Boissière addresses neither, but concludes instead by characterizing the avant garde in terms of ‘an active, voluntarist conception of the material, the idea that one can decree one's own material’, against which she juxtaposes the notion that ‘there must be a dimension of passivity, rendering [musical material as] at the same time something given’. She concludes with the following thesis: ‘It is this dimension of the receptivity of the material, its dimension of plurality, that is lacking in the avant-garde spirit, the fundamental idea that the material is formed in the horizon of intersubjectivity or human plurality’ (246). In Canada I know of only a few composers who practise this aesthetic, among them Toronto's Martin Arnold, with his aesthetic based on Norman Bryson's notion of ‘rhopography’.Footnote ⁸

Boissière's essay, as I say, is a gem. I cannot help but apply it beyond the instance of music and thus reiterate the point made above: at heart the problems faced by contemporary music and by higher education are the same. Pressures within and outside academe would transform professorial work into labour and thus elide the basic distinctions between different academics, distinctions that must be drawn in relation to their respective communities. (At best these pressures would acknowledge only one spurious distinction between communities – between ‘centres of excellence’ and, implicitly, centres of mediocrity.) In Europe no doubt, as in North America, the study of music will undergo homogenizing forces, not the least of which are the forces turning universities into semi-autonomous corporations, private (certainly in the United States) or public (here in Canada, and no doubt the UK). The continued adulation of a select group of ‘super’ musicians, or for that matter a select group of ‘superior’ musicologists, cannot help but aggravate this situation.

For these political reasons I recommend in particular the essays in this collection that make their politics explicit: Paddison, Jimenez, and certainly Boissière. For nothing is so opaque but at the same so durable (‘perennial’ was Adorno's word) as the politics of work, be it teaching, criticism, or composition.