A dozen essays await in this most recent gathering of Leo Treitler's writings, each teeming with ideas and together inviting us to follow one of musicology's most engaged thinkers in a sustained examination of what he calls the ‘awesome task of representing music’ (p. 67).Footnote ¹ Two of the essays are published here for the first time, including a major statement on music notation that resides at the heart of the book.Footnote ² Treitler has selected and revised the remaining ten essays with care. Best of all, he has hit upon a way to order the essays such that ‘each picks up from the preceding an aspect of its perspective’ (p. xi). Though one can profitably browse this collection in any order, it pays dividends to read the chapters successively.

To do so is to experience a series of interlocking, interdependent lectures, in which networks of related ideas arise like leitmotifs in shifting contexts. The headings for these contexts are broad – Language, Performance, Notation, Hermeneutics – and each comes across as a complex modality of the musical experience. The entire parade coheres through a consistency of bearing, perspective, range, density and modus intellegendi.

Treitler's special combination of wide-ranging erudition, uncompromising thought and colourful presentation has long been appreciated by his students and his readers. He feathers his nests with objects from near and far, and it's not uncommon to find spirited references to a recent movie alongside toothsome passages from a medieval treatise. In one three-page stretch of ‘What Kind of a Thing is Musical Notation?’ we encounter musicologist Harold Powers, composers Steve Reich and Alban Berg, the Flying Karamazov Brothers (a team of acrobats and jugglers), a nursery rhyme and a French restaurant in Woodstock, NY. None of these appearances come off as gratuitous within Treitler's ruminations on notation, for all serve to illustrate aspects of our rhythmic competence, understood as a complex cognitive experience that is ‘activated’ by various kinds of musical notation, but also by poetry, circus acts and lots of music.

To read Treitler is to learn not only about Western thought and music extending back to the Greeks, but also about all sorts of things close to hand in his world – the novel on his nightstand, a museum he recently visited, that local restaurant, and so on. There is a charm to the wide-eyed way he pulls all these things in, how he allows his intellectual energy to light up the world around him rather than hunkering down and forgetting that world.

All this multifarious information can make for a cluttered experience, especially on a first reading. At times one wishes that a potent insight or quotation had more time to resonate before the narrative moves forward to the next instance. But subsequent readings (which are invariably rewarding) often transform this sense of being brought up short to one of experiencing a refreshing sense of timing: these essays move like jazz improvisations, threading a succession of variants, glosses and analogues over an argument whose chord changes may not actually sound at any given moment but are still there guiding the effusion of instances.

This sense of ongoing creative investment is especially evident in more explicitly performative aspects of Treitler's essays. At one point in ‘Being at a Loss for Words’, he imagines the different voices of the essay so far as coming together in a scene from a transhistorical opera buffa, in which Galen sings with Aristotle, Augustine with Wittgenstein, and Guido with still others (p. 47). At the end of his essay on the character of Lulu, he asks us to imagine exiting through a gallery of Munch engravings (p. 208). He often stages thought experiments that take the form of fantasies (the very first essay opens with a sinister fantasy about the novelist Garcia Marquez), or that cull relevant analogues from today's culture. For example, when speaking of memory, orality and literacy in the big Notation chapter, Treitler quotes Isidore of Seville: ‘unless sounds are remembered by man, they perish, for they cannot be written down’ (p. 121). Treitler takes this in generously, not as a negative claim about the non-existence of musical notation in the seventh century but as a ‘prophetic imaginative act’ in that Isidore can even think about writing as a possible representational medium for music. And then Treitler goes on to offer this illuminating analogy: ‘It would be as though someone said in 1950 that “unless sounds are recorded by analog means they perish, for they cannot be digitally recorded” (digital recording began in the 1970s)’.

The thought experiments Treitler would have us conduct are not always easy; he acknowledges the need to lift ourselves at times by the bootstraps. One way we are asked to make this kind of self-transcending exertion occurs throughout these writings, in Treitler's repeated call to dismantle the dichotomies that organize so much thought about music and representation. These include gender (as the archetypal dichotomy) as well as a host of others: Self/Other, Music/Language, Orality/Literacy, Making/Doing, Representation/Expression, Natural/Conventional, Explanation/Interpretation, and Hermeneutics/Formalism (‘a hermeneutics that depends on an opposition to formalism is like a three-legged race in which the partners impede each other's progress’ (p. 236).

One way to disempower these dichotomies is to shape them into circles. For example, here's Treitler's formulation of a way out of the usual opposition held to obtain between explanation and interpretation: ‘analysis [explanation] leads to questions answerable only through the interpretation of expressive content; apprehension of expressive content leads to questions answerable only by analysis’ (p. 250). Another effective strategy is to show how the allegedly polar terms of the dichotomy actually have much in common. In his rich opening meditation on the perennial opposition of music and language and their respective ability to signify (‘Langauge and the Interpretation of Music’), Treitler cites Mendelssohn's famous letter in which the composer claims that, for him, the thoughts expressed by music are too definite for words (p. 5). But whereas everyone else mentions this letter for its claim about music's precision, Treitler emphasizes Mendelssohn's ‘far more radical assertion’ about the insurmountable ambiguities of language: ‘It is not music's ineffability that makes for the difficulty of talk about its meaning, Mendelssohn writes, but the ambiguities, vagueness, and inconsistencies that are inherent in the practice of language communication’ (p. 5). To consider language in this way is to trouble the dichotomy, to refuse to let language and music continue to define each other.

Related to Treitler's refusal to honour conceptualizations of music that rely on convenient but questionable dichotomies is his emphasis on how music signifies. Treitler warns against ‘the drowning out of music by meaning’, which happens whenever music is rendered transparent by reducing it to some other cultural sign system: ‘If music signifies, its sounds do not fade for us once its work of signifying is done’ (p. 14). Instead, Treitler deploys examples from Beethoven's Egmont and Mozart's Figaro to demonstrate a two-way flow between ‘the feeling that music gives off’ and the ‘concrete content of human action and feeling’ (p. 13). These domains of meaning reinforce each other, inflect each other, make each other even more interesting. As in his strategy for undoing dichotomies, Treitler again leads one-way traffic into circular, two-way interactions.

Much of Treitler's writing in these essays is about opening music up to a larger range of meanings, which means not only transcending dichotomies but also getting beyond assumed boundaries between different kinds of utterances about music. This is exemplified in his essay on Beethoven's expressive markings. Here Treitler argues that the words involved in expressive markings such as the indication Largo e Mesto at the head of the slow movement to the piano sonata in D, op. 10, no. 3 become part of the music. The boundary between Representation and Expression breaks down, and another dichotomy is dismantled. Treitler takes this kind of move to its logical limit, going on to assert that ‘the music consists of all the qualities that are denoted by the score’ [emphasis mine] (p. 66). Even Beethoven's recommended fingerings for his piano music are to be reckoned as part of what is denoted by the score. In the next large section of the book, music broadens out again, as Treitler argues for thinking of performance not as ‘event’ opposed to the ‘object’ that is the musical work but as itself part of a more generous sense of the musical work.

Treitler's view of music as radically inclusive asks us to accept a wider range of representations of music as an enlivening part of our musical experience. One such directive that I especially applaud is Treitler's call to pay heed to those who write well about music but are not members of the professional guild: ‘We should give serious attention to the writings of those who are skilled in the imaginative and creative use of language – that is, writers of poetry and fiction – whose use of language is often more subtle and versatile than those who are skilled in theorizing, and who may be more concerned with representing through language their experience of music’ (p. 6).

Treitler himself attends to Garcia Marquez and Proust in this regard, and he uses their exemplary descriptions of music to motivate a series of reflections on the impact of metaphor. ‘We prize metaphor, not only for its ability to impart meaning in the most precise way, but even more – at its best, at least – for the way in which its incongruities affect the intellect …, the emotions …, [and] the senses …’ (p. 20). Meaningfully gathered incongruities affect our faculties with something like a cognitive jolt: ‘[The] juxtaposition of incommensurates to achieve a precision of meaning together with an aesthetic kick is the point of true metaphor’ (p. 16). This emphasis on incommensurates allows Treitler to make a striking move, for he goes on to discuss music's own metaphorical effects, which involve similar juxtapositions. His best example is from Schubert's last piano trio, in E-flat, where the melancholy theme from the slow movement occurs again within the cheerfully spirited finale ‘as if out of the depths of the unconscious’ (p. 21). This creates a ‘conspiracy of incompatible realms’, and it produces ‘as powerful a metaphoric effect as any that I can think of in language’ (p. 21). The way these two musics reflect upon each other creates new meaning and in that sense functions like a metaphor expressed in language, which always augments the way we continue to think about its respective terms. For example, to call someone ‘a bull in a china shop’ is to make three things much more vivid than they would be if kept apart: a quiet room full of elegantly beautiful china is suddenly electric with the anticipation of deafening destruction; a large and potentially dangerous animal that is normally given wide berth is now closely confined and probably unhinged about it; and the person whose behaviour prompted the comparison is now deemed both more dangerous (unthinking, out of control) and less so (because comically defused by the comparison). To achieve all these effects (and doubtless more) in an instant is the gratifying advantage of metaphor, which Treitler ultimately deems to be a musical property. As he puts it, ‘Music inhabits the mental realm in which metaphor communicates’ (p. 21f.). This is an enticing thought that grows more richly suggestive the more one thinks about it.

While the musicality of metaphor resides at the heart of Part I (Language) of Treitler's book, reflections on the history and nature of mimesis inform Part III (Notation). Here Treitler encourages us to regard notation less as a set of instructions, a pragmatic encoding of musical sound, and more as ‘one sign system among others through which we represent aspects of our experience’ (p. 107). As we move through the first chapter in this section, musical notation is defamiliarized, made to mingle with analogous realms of visual art, processes of word recognition, and a wide range of rhythmically competent behaviours we call ‘timing’. In the brief but eventful second chapter, Treitler juggles archetypes and hieroglyphs in the act of questioning yet another boundary, this time between sketching and writing.

The fourth and final section of the book, Hermeneutic Frames, opens with the second longest essay in the entire collection, ‘The Lulu Character and the Character of Lulu’. The chiastic construction of this title is emblematic of the hermeneutic approach of the essay, which seeks to show how Lulu as stage character ‘informs and is informed by the character of the drama’ (p. 175). Unlike other interpretations of Lulu as a morality play, a tale of the protagonist's ‘progressive degradation’ (p. 176), Treitler reads the figure of Lulu as a shifting symbol of ‘men's fear of women in a male-dominated society’ (p. 204). Moreover, the doomed men in Lulu's life do not evoke compassion. Treitler trenchantly observes instead that ‘their physical deaths are theatrical events with the emotional charge of the deflation of a dummy’ (p. 188). Instead of some cathartic identification with these characters, ‘it is the succession itself, the rhythm of it that works its effect. One by one these figures become lifeless’ (p. 188). As in Greek tragedy, a large-scale rhythmic determinism plays out ineluctably, with Lulu's death as the final downbeat. And she is decisively included in Treitler's cogent assessment of character within the workings of this opera: ‘we cannot take the characters on the stage seriously as real people. But we are meant to take very seriously the reality of what they have been put on the stage to show us’ (p. 190f.).

After this ample application of musical hermeneutics, Treitler ends the book with four briefer chapters that each address current trends in musicology. The result is an accumulating polemical momentum, giving the final section of the book something like the enhanced animation of a rondo finale in the classical style. The first of these essays shows why ‘the gesture toward historicalisation [in much recent criticism] remains uncomsummated’ (p. 218). In the next, Treitler taxes those critics who ‘demystify’ music and reduce it to ‘occasions for criticism’ (p. 233). He then asks what the rules of the game could possibly be for such purveyors of ‘arbirtrary statements about music with which one can neither agree nor disagree’ (p. 233). ‘Whatever the answer’, Treitler concludes, ‘such criticism is not about music’ (p. 233). The penultimate essay critiques interpretations of Beethoven by Lawrence Kramer and Schubert by Edward T. Cone, in a bid to rescue the hermeneutic circle from the dichotomies that can be said to inform their respective hermeneutics. And finally, Treitler turns to no less a figure than Theodore Adorno, who, like the men of Lulu, quickly finds himself deflated like a dummy. Even so, I hasten to add that Treitler ends his critique of Adorno on a more sympathetic note, suggesting that ‘Adorno's work was a casualty of the very conditions he diagnosed’ (p. 265).

Treitler's chafing discomfort with the confines of the musicological guild accounts for many syncopated accents within his polemic. But unlike a bull in the china shop, he has long made a home (though at times an uneasy one) within one of the hallowed sanctuaries of this selfsame guild. In reading these essays, one never forgets that Treitler is a scholar for whom medieval chant remains a cardinal point of orientation. Seven of the twelve essays in this book refer to specific instances of medieval theory and practice, several of them centrally. This perspective remains fruitful, for the problem of chant and its dissemination forces the issue of music's ontology in a way that illuminates the rest of Western music history. One comes away from this book realizing, for example, that variant performances of chant and variant performances of Chopin both complicate any tidy view of music. Moreover, Treitler continues to make potent observations about the production and reception of chant, as when he suggests that the deepest tradition common to both Frankish and Roman chant is the pace of declamation (p. 77), or when he reminds us of the historiographical ramifications of positioning Gregorian chant at the ‘headwaters’ of the German tradition (p. 225). The career-long constancy of Treitler's engagement with the challenges of medieval musical thought demonstrates above all that the most gratifying interdisciplinarity remains grounded in a commitment to disciplinarity.

Reflections on Musical Meaning and its Representations makes it clear that the eminent critic who changed the way we think about not just one but several fields of musical thought – including historiography, chant studies, and Beethoven studies – is not done yet. He still commands an astonishing range of reference, still knows how to make edification entertaining, and unlike so many others in this age of instant intellection, he still thinks more than once about anything that is on his mind. More important yet, Treitler makes us think more than once, asking us to defamiliarize much that we take for granted in musical discourse. Like few others, he brings everything he can to bear upon our engagement with the musical experience, with the result that he finds more and more ways that music bears upon the rest of our experience. At the beginning of these essays, at the end, and everywhere along the way, Treitler shows how music can help us reflect on the complexity of all human expressivity, all human communication, all representation – in short, on the whole cognitive circus. In my own fantasy about this rich volume, I hear Leo Treitler's voice hailing the rest of us with a singular invitation: ‘Hereinspaziert!’