Rehearing colonial representation

Bloechl's introduction stands apart as a virtuosic tapestry of post-colonial theory in which she throws down a gauntlet, offering radical challenges to traditional historiography and ‘directions for a postcolonial musicology’. If some of the characters in this theoretical introduction are by now well known to musicology, the majority is less so. In fact, one of the most important aspects of the book lies in its exposition of a wide variety of post-colonial theories that have been all but ignored by musicology, and in its distillation of their potential relevance to the discipline. It is this dimension that will undoubtedly place Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music at the top of post-colonial musicology reading lists for many years to come.

The sheer number of theoretical concepts makes for a dizzying first thirty pages and confounds attempts at a comprehensive summary. However, Bloechl makes it clear that two ‘genealogical’ aims lie at the centre of the project: first, to trace how French and English colonial encounters with Native American music impacted upon the development of European music in the early modern period; and second, to identify the lingering effects of colonial ideologies and practices in our own historiographies of music. Although Bloechl is right to acknowledge her methodological debt to Foucault, it is clear that these genealogical questions come via Homi Bhabha, as do the traces of Derridean ambivalence that she sees in the staging of colonial power. Similarly, Kelly Oliver's psychoanalytic historiography of ‘witnessing’ and Chakrabarty's notion of ‘subaltern pasts’ have equivalences in Bhabha. All of these concepts, united by their concern with ‘cultural memory that is barred from being plausible knowledge’ (6), propose a model of studying history that counters colonial historiographies by listening for that which is left unsaid, omitted or repressed. Given the shared concerns of these theorists, Bloechl might have considered concentrating on Bhabha and curtailing some of the other references, if only to appease potential criticism that her introduction was itself more about staging her own spectacle of theoretical power than framing the aims of the book. Nevertheless, she does the field a service in her cogent exposition of a broad range of theoretical concepts that have yet to be mined by musicologists for the productive challenges they might pose to traditional modes of historiography.

Bloechl's lucid explanation and application of Bhabha's ideas make clear that musicologists ignore him at their peril. The concept of ‘ambivalence’ is particularly central to her against-the-grain interpretations of spectacles of colonial power, whether in early accounts of Native American song or stagings of the ‘Indian’ on the European stage. Where others have heard unambiguous power and unchallenged domination, Bloechl follows Bhabha in hearing colonial representation as a means through which colonisers dealt with the unsettling effects of the colonial encounter on the power and universalism of European ideologies. Although the concept of ambivalence is fast approaching the status of cliché in the humanities at large, its presence in post-colonial musicology represents a welcome respite from Said-dependent notions of musical exoticism that assume the one-dimensional power of the coloniser and the exotic ‘difference’ of the colonised. Of course, there are legitimate concerns about the capacity of ambivalence to cover up the violence of colonisation,Footnote ⁴ but it is nevertheless strange that, whilst debate over whether women are ‘undone’ or ‘envoiced’ by opera has raged on for many years now, the idea that stage representations of colonial subjects may have an empowering effect has yet to be explored in depth. Even more radical than Bloechl's emphasis on ambivalence is the way she moves her focus beyond the search for articulation of exotic difference, a search that has often served to limit rather than enrich connections between music and colonialism. Far from averting her ears from those ‘Indians’ who, for example, are portrayed with normative (French) musical styles, she capitalises on these examples to consider more subtle ways in which the colonial encounter was represented on the musical stage.

In the first part of the book proper, Bloechl discusses the ‘spectacle’ of Native American song as represented in colonial travel literature and anthropology. One of the central goals of the three chapters that comprise this section is to underline the extent to which English and French discourse on sacred music crossed the Atlantic and informed European understandings of indigenous song. The idea that a form of conceptual imperialism coloured descriptions of Native American practices by early colonials should come as no surprise. Nevertheless, the depth and specificity of the connections that Bloechl draws between these two traditionally separate domains of historical enquiry is impressive. Chapter 2 (‘Protestant Imperialism and the Metaphysics of New World Song’) begins with the discursive overlap between Protestant critiques of Catholic liturgical music and early accounts of Native American song. That Jean de Léry, a Huguenot travel writer, drew explicit connections between the music of the Brazilian Tupinambas and that of the Roman Catholic Church allows us to gain a new appreciation of war-torn, sixteenth-century France itself through its depiction of colonial Others. The real climax of the chapter, however, comes with the deconstructive implications that Bloechl draws from these accounts. Not only did early colonisers recognise the presence of non-human forces in Native American ceremonies but they also conceptualised attempts to ‘civilise’ indigenous peoples as part of the same struggle (against Satan) that they experienced on home soil. As Bloechl eloquently points out, this ‘spiritual hearing’ complicates the simplistic image of colonial power relations as a struggle between coloniser and colonised: ‘Protestant imperialism functioned along both “horizontal” and “vertical” axes of power, in relation to other non-Protestant human beings and to non-human, supernatural beings’ (55). The apparent presence of unworldly forces in indigenous song increased its power to unsettle European colonisers.

In Chapter 3 (‘The Voice of Possession’), Bloechl moves on from Protestant imperialism to European travel writers' use of demonological explanation for ecstatic song and ceremony. This too was a mode of translating the singing, dancing and animal mimicry of Native Americans into more familiar terms. The invocation of Christian ideas of possession and the staging of public exorcisms by Catholics were modes of containment that, according to Bloechl, never succeeded. Not only did ecstatic song remain a disturbing presence in the colonies (as in Europe), but the threat to order was magnified as public exorcisms threatened to devolve into uncontrollable scenes. Bloechl's fourth chapter (‘The Voice of Prophecy’) discusses the considerably less common tendency to align indigenous colonial rituals with the prophetic outbursts of seventeenth-century English Dissenters and Quakers. Along with prophecy's unearthly source, its rumoured capacity to affect even the most resistant of listeners rendered the connections unsettling. On the one hand, the comparisons between Dissenting prophets and Algonquian priest song functioned as an effective critique of the former. On the other, these connections inadvertently struck at the heart of contemporary English anxieties about cultural hybridisation.

The reciprocal presence of European demoniacs in travel descriptions of Native American song and of ‘Indian’ ecstasy in the margins of anti-Quaker tracts allows us to recognise the multidirectional nature of colonial influence that Bloechl aims to tease out. Rather than lamenting the compromised status of travel literature as ethnography, she reasserts its value as a tool with which to question traditional modes of historiography. In demonstrating that the self-sufficiency and independence of European history should not be taken for granted, the mutual influence of colonial and metropolitan discourses that she uncovers provides compelling support for Chakrabarty's project of ‘provincializing Europe’ – a project to which she declares allegiance in her introduction.Footnote ⁵

Bloechl also seeks to demonstrate, in this first part, what is lost when we banish metaphysical and spiritual forms of power from our historiographies. Far from dismissing the metaphysical powers attributed to ecstatic song, she capitalises on these forms of ‘spiritual hearing’ to deepen our understanding of certain musical experiences and complicate the ways in which we conceive of early colonial power relations. Bloechl's commitment to meeting the metaphysical on its own terms makes for an almost ethnographic sense of even-handedness, as she interprets the accounts of travel writers without passing judgement on their veracity. For the most part, her discussion demonstrates that early modern metaphysics can be admitted as historical evidence without history itself descending into mysticism.

There are, however, a few points where echoes of the book's mystical subject matter might reverberate in its historiographical model. This is most apparent when she appeals to recent epistemologies of the body in musicological performance studies – notably those of Suzanne Cusick and Elisabeth Le Guin – as models for granting agency to colonial Others: ‘Both scholars explore the bodily sensorium as an ethical matrix or, in terms closer to what I am using here, as an instrumental agent whose agency depends on some kind of congress with another who is not quite present’ (15).Footnote ⁶ Here, and in her endorsement of Gary Tomlinson's call for dialogue with colonial Others, Bloechl appeals to a particularly contentious model of agency; she, of course, knows only too well that ‘granting ancestors, gods, or spirits agency in our histories, let alone colonials’ (15) is something that sits uneasily with traditional music history. With this in mind, it would appear unproductive to charge her with ventriloquism, re-entering the long-running ‘agency’ debate that seems to have entangled musicologists recently without offering any apparent solutions.Footnote ⁷ Nevertheless, however important it is for the wider project of ‘provincializing Europe’, Bloechl's claim to conversation with indigenous voices is one that she need not have made, for her concern throughout is almost exclusively with colonisers' ambivalence. That is to say, my impression in reading the book was that Bloechl's citation of Native American song functioned mainly as a tool with which to undermine the assumed power of the colonisers rather than to enhance our understanding of the beliefs and perspectives of the colonised. It is almost as if these particular claims made in the introduction were addressing a different project. Yet perhaps there is a good reason for this discrepancy, because the sporadic points where Bloechl returns to claim a quasi-ethnographic encounter with the ‘native’ prove problematic. For example, in concluding one of her chapters on the ‘spiritual hearing’ of ecstatic song by European colonisers with the urge for ‘an expanded understanding of the nature of the [metaphysical and spiritual forms of] power that European and indigenous American people believed was involved in early colonial conflicts’ (my italics) (78), Bloechl appears to conflate European ambivalence with the ‘beliefs’ of indigenous peoples themselves. In rare moments such as this she comes dangerously close to a more objectionable form of colonial ventriloquism than the deliberately provocative stance set out in her introduction.

John Smith's description of a Powhatan women's dance of thanksgiving as a ‘Virginia maske’ serves as a useful segue into the next section of the book, which is concerned with representations of Native Americans on the European stage (‘Staging the Indian’). Whilst Bloechl's against-the-grain readings of colonial travel diaries yielded striking insights into the power of indigenous song, the idea of using these primary sources to interpret operatic representation appears even more radical. Chapter 5 deals with the courtly masque, the English spectacle of power par excellence, as it was staged under the Stuart kings James I and Charles I. Here Bloechl adds her voice to the growing chorus seeking to replace the conceptualisation of the masque as an unambiguous celebration of royal power with a dialectical understanding that allows for the masque's undoing of its own representations of power. The exotic ‘Indian’ that is by now a stock figure in post-colonial opera scholarship does appear in the anti-masque sections that preceded the masque proper, although Bloechl cautions for the need to distinguish the specific early modern mechanism of difference invoked here from the socio-evolutionist racism of the nineteenth century. More central to Bloechl's attempts to move ‘beyond Exoticism’ are works such as The Memorable Masque (1613); instead of presenting colonial subjects as Other in order to legitimise their subjugation, this piece incorporates noble ‘Indians’ as noble characters in the main portion of the masque. Bloechl explains this as an attempt to affirm the Stuarts' power to bring order to Britain and its colonies.

The idea of the noble ‘Indian’ is explored in greater depth in Chapter 6 (‘Savage Lully’), for while its appearance in the Stuart masque was something of a rarity, the representation of Indians as ideal colonial subjects was the norm in French musical spectacles. It is in regard to examples such as Lully's fifth entrée to Le Temple de la Paix (1685), in which colonial peoples are represented as paying homage to Louis XIV in normative (‘French’) musical style, that Bhabha's work seems most relevant. Bloechl's conceptualisation of Lully's Native Americans in ‘cross-cultural drag’, as embodiments of the ‘ambivalence’ that struck at the heart of all colonial projects, is extremely compelling. In explaining Lully's dual posture towards representatives of the colonised, she writes:

This fits perfectly with Bhabha's oft-cited aphorism about the colonial ‘desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite’.Footnote ⁸ More importantly, Bloechl's discussion demonstrates that recognising the fundamental ambivalence of the colonising mission need not mean averting our eyes and ears from its violence.

One of the most provocative moments of the book comes with her suggestion that ‘[p]erhaps it is not so strange to perceive something savage in Lully's music after all’ (176), a suggestion that makes good on the more radical promises of her introduction. It is not just that she transforms Lully from the ultimate embodiment of French bon goût to musical savage in a single sentence, but that she does so without any direct evidence or markers in the works themselves; in fact, she declares her interpretation in self-conscious opposition to the musical ‘evidence’. Bloechl declines to take at face value the politicised decorum of Lully's bienséance, a position that calls to mind Kelly Oliver's theory of ‘witnessing’ to which she referred in the introduction:

Inspired by Oliver, she listens for the presence of an absence – the colonial violence left unsung. Whilst this hermeneutic leap might seem irresponsible in the abstract – opening Pandora's box to a world of unfalsifiable interpretations – her reading of the passage from Le Temple de la Paix (1685) is wholly convincing. Indeed, she captures two important aspects of Lully's staging of colonialism: first, the extent to which it was simply too beautiful to be ‘true’; and second, that the very need to represent reality in such distorted fashion was evidence of a profound anxiety at the core of the colonial project.

If Lully covered up the din of violence with the idyllic sound of the pastoral, Rameau's more experimental music served as a lightning rod for the threats posed by colonial encounters. In the final chapter (‘Rameau's Les Sauvages and the Aporia of Musical Nature’), Bloechl tackles Enlightenment efforts to determine the origin and nature of ‘primitive’ expression in all their complexity. According to her, the equation of Rameau's music with the sound of ‘sauvages’ was no mere metaphor; on the contrary, it testified to the unnerving mixture of nature and artifice that critics heard in their own and other's music, a mixture that confounded attempts to rationalise either as natural. It is here that the connections between the book's two parts become clear: discussions of ambivalent representation of colonial expression in the second half resonate with accounts of unsettling savage song in the first; Rameau's musical savages, Bloechl argues, ‘gave audible form to the Enlightenment aporia of “primitive” song’ (180). Concentrating on the last entrée from Les Indes Galantes, along with the keyboard piece from which it derives, she suggests that in representing ‘les sauvages’ with a split caractère – a mixture of stylised simplicity and chromatic artifice – the composer highlighted the threat of a French modern music split to the root, ‘neither fully natural nor fully artificial but somehow, inscrutably both’ (194). It is in this chapter that Bloechl's otherwise archaeological tone gives way to the partisan politics of early eighteenth-century French music as she pits Rameau's apparently self-consciously deconstructive ambivalence against the unwitting anxieties of Lully.Footnote ¹⁰ More central to the wider aims of the book, however, is the fact that debate engendered by the representation of savage song in Rameau's time suggests that the French saw themselves in their depiction of others, and saw others in their discussion of their own music.

Rather than simply lamenting the all-too-common conflation of empire with exoticism in musicology, Bloechl demonstrates what happens when we move ‘beyond Exoticism’. Her readings of the ‘Indians’ in early modern theatre not only subvert traditional understandings of the colonial politics of these regimes, but also point the way forward to a more complex understanding of the politics of empire as they appear on the stage. Her conceptual models offer the opportunity to capture the complexity of theatrical reception more vividly, allowing for those uncanny moments of affinity and ambivalence that militate against the putative ‘message’ of the dramatic work. In light of her commitment to uncovering multiple and unsettling meanings, it is hard not to feel that she misses a trick in overlooking the performative element in the staging of colonial difference, the extent to which meaning could be subtly inflected and subverted through performance. For genres such as the masque, ballet and opera, in which there was such emphasis placed on the mise-en-scène, Bloechl pays little attention to the visual dimensions of the drama. In comparison with her radically progressive approach to musical hermeneutics, her treatment of dramatic works as musical texts appears surprisingly old-fashioned.

The structure of the book raises some important questions, one of which concerns the ever-problematic relationship between critical theory and the practice of history. In heading a relatively theory-free monograph with a densely theoretical introduction, Bloechl appears to be constructing a framework in a manner common to recent musicology. Yet a subtle indication that there is something more radical about this book comes with the completeness with which it abandons its initial theoretical interlocutors and never looks back. An impatient reader might deduce that there is no relation between the work's theoretical framework and the history that it tells, proof positive of the irreconcilability of theory with history. However, on closer inspection, one realises that the opening theoretical ideas serve an important function: theory becomes a mode of situating the work within broader historiographical trends rather than a source of authority for specific interpretations. Rather than constantly thrusting post-colonial theory before the faces of her readers, Bloechl sets out to absorb it into her history so that it – like the colonial violence on Lully's stage – remains a silent presence throughout. This is an admirable aim, but one that comes at a price: for the most part, Bloechl leaves it up to her readers to imagine how the theoretical concepts she invokes relate to her discussions on a local level. We are also left guessing at how the author understands the relationship between the two parts of her book. How do the chapters on Native American song relate to those on opera? What does her focus on opera in the conclusion say about the importance of ecstatic song to her overall argument? Is this a book about opera or about Native American song? These are, of course, questions that ignore the purpose of the book, which is to propose radical connections between these apparently distinct fields. However, in refraining from making the connections between internal sections explicit, she allows for atomistic readings that bypass her most impressive interdisciplinary challenges.

The triumph of subversion

In comparison with Bloechl's, the introduction to The Triumph of Pleasure comes across as uninterested in post-structuralist theory. The only theoretical model invoked comes with a fleeting reference to the associations drawn between the hedonism of spectacle and political free thought sketched by seventeenth-century philosopher Pierre Gasendi. Nevertheless, Cowart's introduction makes clear that her framework for understanding the politics of spectacle is no less striking in its revisionism or wide-ranging in its scope. Like Bloechl, she is interested in elements that unsettled the monarchical propaganda of theatrical representation. Instead of colonial subjects, however, Cowart's agents of subversion reside much closer to home; for her, the French nobility and artists themselves ‘deliberately undermined the propaganda of a kingship’ and ‘transformed the celebration of the monarch into a utopian celebration of public entertainment as a new societal model’ (xv). Of central importance to this subversion were the images of love and pleasure that pervaded musical spectacles of this period. Although Isherwood conceptualised love and power as two sides of the same propagandistic coin – complementary attributes of an idealised Sun King – we have already seen, in the first act of Cadmus et Hermione, that these concepts were often in tension with each other. Cowart is not the first to acknowledge the subversive potential of love and pleasure, but her monograph provides a compelling historical rationale for their importance to dissenting artists: as souvenirs of courtly identity before the encroachment of absolutism, these concepts were perfect for challenging images of monarchic power. Unlike Bloechl, Cowart is less concerned with framing artworks within new discursive contexts than with mapping out virtuosic intertextual connections between pieces: the primary sources of her study remain largely restricted to the works themselves.

Each chapter contributes to the overarching narrative that charts the shifting ideological positions of spectacle under Louis XIV. This journey is essentially a circular one, in which various forms of musical theatre went from articulating a hedonistic and galant identity to an absolutist court one, and then back again towards the end of the Sun King's reign. Against this grand narrative, Cowart pits more detailed readings of specific works and the ways in which they articulated complicated and at times subversive dialogues with these identities. Chapter 1 (‘Muses of Pleasure’) represents the first stage of Cowart's narrative, concerning itself with the ballet de cour in the early years of Louis XIV's reign. The author's interpretation of the Ballet d'Alcidiane (1658) as embodying an idyllic relationship between monarchy (as represented by Alcidiane) and nobility (as represented by Polexandre) stands as a compelling symbol for the general ideology of the early ballet de cour. However, much as Bloechl did for the galant Indians, Cowart suggests that such a representation is best understood as wishful thinking – the manifestation of anxiety or subtle protest against a royal absolutism that had already begun to encroach on the hedonism of the genre. Cowart also points out that the subtle tensions between love and war or glory – ciphers for the conflicting interests of noble galanterie and royal absolutism – are manifest in the Ballet de la nuit (1653), a work often remembered as the source of the Sun King's sobriquet. As such, the fact that Louis also danced the role of ‘Game’, a character who decides to leave Venus's side in pursuit of military glory, signals the potential shadow cast over the king's iconic role as the rising sun.

Chapter 2 (‘Muses of Memory’) is concerned with the ballet de cour of the 1660s, a period in which the genre's ‘voluptuous hedonism’ was increasingly moderated by ‘images of strong order’ that, according to Cowart, pointed towards tragédie en musique. If she was previously concerned with the challenge to absolutism voiced by the disenfranchised nobility, the agents of critique that emerge in this chapter are the artists themselves. Cowart argues that, as the king evolved from participant to patron, his ‘image makers’ found ways to critique art's centralisation and monarchic self-aggrandisement. The chapter culminates with a reading of the Ballet des Muses (1666), in which the prologue is interpreted as a meta-theatrical reflection upon the reduction of art to royal flattery. In stark contrast with Isherwood's reading of this piece as a glorification of the role of Louis as a patron of the arts, Cowart interprets this self-conscious staging of the ‘political empire of the arts’ as a subtle form of protest.Footnote ¹¹ Furthermore, she attributes to Orpheus's exotic voice a capacity to resist the encroachment of art's centralisation.

In her interpretation of the figure of Orpheus as a symbol for protesting artists, Cowart reminds readers that it was Lully himself who took this role, a point that raises important questions about allegorical identities in relation to participating bodies. In sporadically alluding to the roles assigned to the king, nobility and musicians, Cowart implies that the competing voices she hears were a result of the participation of these three distinct groups. Although one would not want to restrict the author to identity connections prescribed by dancing roles and livrets, a little more clarity in how she conceptualises the relationship between allegorical and actual identity might have helped. Although Lully's role as Orpheus lines up well with Cowart's interpretation of the prologue as representing the king's own ‘image makers’, her reading of the Ballet d'Alcidiane (1658) does not work so well. How, for example, might the fact that the king danced the role of a Moor – not Alcidiane – complicate Cowart's interpretation of the latter as a symbol for the monarchy?Footnote ¹² These inconsistencies or ambiguities in her model of agency appear throughout the book, as she moves back and forth between the language of intention and interpretation. Which artists were responsible for the subversive meanings she ascribes? How exactly did participating nobles voice their opposition to royal absolutism? To what extent did audience members pick up on the significance of these connections? The perils of attributing agency in forming political interpretations of opera, which have been addressed extensively for contemporaneous England in the debates surrounding Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, only become more obvious as Cowart presses her hermeneutic labour further in later chapters.Footnote ¹³ To be fair, she does try to resolve these questions in the conclusion:

However, given the wide range of interpretative models that she adopts throughout the monograph, this explanation does not entirely succeed in dispelling doubts.

Chapter 3 (‘Muses of Satire’) centres on a discussion of Lully's and Molière's final and best-known comédie-ballet, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670). For Cowart, it was the ‘bifocal’ nature of the genre itself – its liminal status between courtly and public spectacle – that opened it up to potentially oppositional interpretations. The notion that the work functioned just as much as a satire of the king himself as of the pretentious bourgeoisie is, in itself, hardly new.Footnote ¹⁴ However, Cowart's particular interest lies in the work's little-explored dialogue with the Ballet des Muses (1666), which she interprets as part of a wider tradition of drawing upon and satirising the pretensions of the ballet de cour, a tradition to which she returns throughout the book. In contrast to Stephen Fleck's reading of the conclusion of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme as a triumph of the courtly pastoral, Cowart argues that the concluding ballet des nations subversively champions theatre as a public form of entertainment:

Whilst Cowart is right to point out the importance of this representation of the audience to the comédie-ballet's ideological message, it is worth noting that such metatheatrical moments were hardly uncommon. In fact, the representation of an awestruck audience – grateful for the entertainment they had, or were about to, receive – was a cliché of propagandistic prologues.Footnote ¹⁵ As such, the enthusiastic reception of lavish spectacles by on-stage audiences might serve as way of prescribing and controlling reception just as easily as it might act as an instrument of subversion. From this perspective, there is a sense in which the end of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme is actually more reverential to Louis (as represented by Monsieur Jourdain) for his patronage of the arts than it might first appear. Whilst Cowart's focus on subversion has great revisionist appeal elsewhere in the book – when discussing works often regarded as instruments of royal propaganda – the fact that this particular work's dissidence is such well-trodden terrain dilutes the effect of her reading. One might even go as far as to suggest that it might actually be more radical to tackle the difficult question of how this work – which, after all, was commissioned by the king himself – did serve to sustain monarchic ideologies.Footnote ¹⁶

Cowart's focus on tragic works in her fourth chapter sets it apart from the others, which are concerned with more modest dramatic genres. That she parses this period, spanning almost thirty years of the Sun King's reign (1671–97), as an ‘interlude’ might suggest an element of strain in the narrative. However, it is refreshing that, unlike most treatments of this period, the principal interest here lies less in the propagandistic tragédies lyriques of Lully and Quinault than in the lesser-known works that challenged this propaganda; according to Cowart, the works of Campistron and Lully's sons picked up and magnified the ‘truly subversive’ tone of late (Jean-Baptiste) Lully. For example, in reversing the sun imagery of the Ballet de Flore (1669) by identifying the hero with the villainous north wind, Louis and Jean-Louis Lully's Zephire et Flore (1688) functions as a potential distortion of the archetypal Lullian hero. Within the developmental context of her narrative, one might see these tragic ‘reversals’ as lending retrospective authority to the moments of subversion that Cowart identified in Jean-Baptiste Lully's own works. Her interpretation of Louis Lully's Orphée (1690), for example, does this in two ways: firstly, the now-extreme tension between love and war partially vindicates her emphasis on these tensions in the earlier operas and ballets; and, secondly, the figure of the oppressed musician-hero – read by Cowart as Louis Lully's subversive portrait of his father – lends retrospective credence to her reading of the Orpheus from Jean-Baptiste Lully's Ballet des Muses as a symbol of protest against the centralisation of the arts.

What emerges most clearly in this ‘tragic interlude’ is a strong dependence on generic boundaries. As one might expect from such a meticulous historian, Cowart often frames her political readings with discussions of the genre-specific modes of production and reception and, as already suggested, she implies a strong relationship between politics and production. Perhaps it was generic considerations – the lack of noble participants and greater regulation of its propaganda – that caused Cowart to shy away from hunting the big game of the tragédie lyrique, the genre most central to the ‘myth of absolute power’. Yet it is hard not to feel that Cowart misses a trick here, for one of the most compelling features of her conceptualisation of galant pleasure as a mode of subversion is its capacity to transcend generic boundaries and, more specifically, to account for the many ‘problems’ of the tragédie lyrique.

The reason Robert Isherwood's arguments about the genre are unconvincing, one might argue, lies in their attempts to suppress precisely the kinds of tensions that Cowart highlights in the ballet de cour. In opposition to Isherwood's assertion that ‘Quinault's characters were unfettered by complex or ambiguous motives’ and equally confident declaration that ‘Love dominates the hero's behavior’, Downing Thomas has recently pointed to many instances in which pastoral celebrations of love act as foils to the hero's cold pursuit of personal glory.Footnote ¹⁷ Cowart does allude sporadically to the presence of these tensions in Lullian opera but, in contrast with her discussions of the ballet de cour, she never really takes seriously the threats these tensions pose to the propagandistic agenda of the tragédie lyrique. For example, although she is in partial agreement with Thomas in allowing for some level of sympathy for the eponymous sorceress in Armide (1686), she ultimately denies this ‘musical’ sympathy any wider significance. In fact, her reading of Lully's operatic swansong as the ‘negative reinforcement of the perfection of Louis as “greatest hero”’ provides a stark contrast with Thomas's view (134).Footnote ¹⁸ This is a somewhat unexpected divergence of opinion as, in many ways, Cowart's work would provide a compelling framework with which to contextualise and theorise the ‘problems’ that Thomas approached on the level of isolated works.

These minor contradictions in Cowart's treatment of tragédie lyrique result from the tension between her grand utopian narrative and the more localised elements of subversion in specific works. That she presents Lullian tragédie as an absolutist betrayal of the pastoral ideal, a lamentable ‘interlude’ in the more general triumph of pleasure, is understandable. Much like her comparable parsing of ballet de cour as an ‘archaic fête monarchique’ (167) later in the book, it strengthens the rhetorical effect of her interpretation of later works as intertextual ‘reversals’. However, in the case of both genres, she comes very close to undoing some of her earlier readings of specific works and their resistance to the power relations prescribed by their genres.

In Chapter 5, Cowart addresses opéra-ballets from the last decade of Louis' reign, a period in which he withdrew from public glory in favour of pious seclusion. In these works, she identifies a return of galanterie and the eclipse of heroism. Departing from critical tendencies to dismiss the genre of opéra-ballet as frivolous, Cowart argues that works such as Campra's L'Europe Galante (1697) were able to articulate political critique through their intertextual dialogues with the themes, personages and scenarios of the ballet de cour.Footnote ¹⁹ Much as in previous chapters, the agent of subversion in Chapter 5 is the figure of Love. However, the introduction of the character of Folly in Chapter 6 signals a move to more direct challenges to the ‘rational order and humorless control’ of royal ideology. Not only does Cowart point out more intertextual ‘dialogues’ between works, but she also details a series of ballets that use the locus amoenus of the Venetian Carnival to celebrate the public arts of Paris and challenge the ideals of purity, subtlety and simplicity mandated by the Académies. These last two chapters are a perfect showcase for Cowart's virtuosic command of a repertory unknown even to specialists, and she does the field a great service in reviving these intertextes inconnus. Although Cowart's writing style itself is as lucid as one could hope for, it is perhaps worth noting that the complexity of the intertextual relationships – as she charts interactions between models, parodies and meta-parodies – places great demands on even the most attentive of readers. In the end, however, it is worth the effort and endurance required to reach some of the most impressive parts of the book.

In her concluding chapter, Cowart extends her range of intertexts into the realm of painting as she interprets Watteau's Pilgrimage to Cythera as a visual translation of the opéra-ballet's utopian imagery; in directing the historical gaze towards the genre of opéra-ballet, she is able to provide a fuller explanation for the painting's refined tone whilst connecting it with specific works and livret frontispieces. Watteau's painting proves a perfect vehicle to conclude her reflections on the ways in which the staging of pleasure was at once dependent on and subtly subversive of the ideologies of absolutism. Just as the Pilgrimage to Cythera has been variously interpreted as either the embodiment of aristocratic privilege or a form of ‘radical enlightenment’, so Cowart's discussion of the reception history of the painting affords readers an opportunity to reflect on the radical revisionism of The Triumph of Pleasure and its transformation of the musical spectacles of Louis XIV's France from ancien régime propaganda to a utopian declaration of the independence of art in the public sphere.

Ambivalent optimism

Even a cursory glance at these two monographs reveals that Bloechl and Cowart are responding to the same problem of one-dimensional interpretations of the politics of spectacle in this period. Whether they are ultimately concerned with ballet, masque or the ‘spectacular’ representation of early colonial song, both authors find that the framework of absolute power fails to do justice to the complexities of the musical works and discourses they discuss. From this perspective, it may seem only natural to regard the two books as complementary, employing different viewpoints to achieve a common goal. However, Bloechl's somewhat ambivalent nod to Cowart in her conclusion suggests that the relationship between the projects is considerably more complex. After praising the recognition of the subversive potential of putatively ‘light genres’, she warns the reader of the price that comes with Cowart's celebration of the utopian triumph of pleasure:

Here Bloechl implies that their respective vantage points conflict, that clarity in one necessitates opacity in the other – that one group's triumph is another's subjugation. Given her interpretation of Lully's galanterie as ‘savage’, it was perhaps only to be expected that she would hear violence in the hedonistic sounds of French musical spectacle.

However, one cannot help but notice the strange timing of Bloechl's critique; in all but concluding her monograph with this uncharacteristically acerbic point, she gives the impression that her discomfort with the ‘triumph of pleasure’ goes well beyond the exotic settings of Campra's opéra-ballets. Indeed, her critique strikes at the heart of what is so unusual about The Triumph of Pleasure – namely that the utopianism of Cowart's subject matter trickles through into the historiographical model itself. By now we are, of course, thoroughly inured to the ‘sullying’ of music with irreverent talk of power relations. Because we are accustomed to musicologists taking our best-loved pieces and revealing them as tools of oppression and control, we perhaps find it difficult to accept such an optimistic account of musical power relations. As Bloechl rightly points out, there are legitimate questions about the blind spots of this vision, not to mention its historical determinism. Yet there is also much to admire in Cowart's commitment to releasing this repertory from an ill-fitting conceptual model despite the risk of appearing naively optimistic from the perspective of critical discourse on power relations.

Interestingly, it is not hard to sense in Native American Song a similar optimism about potentially subversive power relations and the promise of new musical research in this area to that in The Triumph of Pleasure. As such, one might even argue that Bloechl's objections hint at an element of ‘ambivalence’ on her part about the revisionism in which she too is invested; it is possible that Cowart's book acts as a mirror in which Bloechl recognises an unsettling reflection. Up until her conclusion, she has been relatively uninterested in the ‘self conceptions’ of Native Americans, focusing on the ambivalence of European colonisers. There is a refreshing lack of the guilt or indignation that often drives one-sided discussions of colonial power relations. Once free of the constant need to reaffirm the injustices of colonial domination, Bloechl – like Cowart – can dare to imagine elements of subversion and ambivalence in even the most controlling of spectacles. If Bloechl is rightly cautious about discussions of early modern power that appear surprisingly positive, it is this optimistic outlook that represents the most striking feature of both books. In moving, for the most part, beyond discussions of whether specific works or composers were pro- or contra- colonialism or absolutism, both Bloechl and Cowart treat this music and discourse with unprecedented sensitivity. In doing so, they both open up a space for new discussions and interpretations of early modern spectacle.