The Enlightenment project was vast and multifarious. Although the concept of the Enlightenment did not become a generic tag until the time of the French Revolution, it was the product of decades-long developments in philosophy, economics, politics, aesthetics and epistemology fanning out across Europe from France (Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); see in particular chapters 1 and 2). Stephen Rumph here traces how music during this period, and Mozart's music specifically, resonated with these broader intellectual and societal currents, especially in the shifts registered narratologically in the movement from imitation to expression. His is a daunting task, yet one he accomplishes admirably. Anyone wishing to understand musical developments across the eighteenth century in relation to the larger matrices of ideas, actions and events triggered by changing intellectual currents and practices eventually understood as ‘enlightened’ will want to reckon with this book. It may well become a beacon in the field.
Specifically, this is a must-read book for those seeking to understand the changing contexts of musical signification in the later eighteenth century. The argument put forward is simultaneously simple and complex. It is simple in that the book has a straightforward task – to lay out a theory of Enlightenment semiotics in music – but complex because sign theory is incompletely discussed in writings, texts and philosophical treatises of the period, requiring that it be meticulously teased out from a diverse range of critical writings to reveal an interlocking web of connections between the worlds of ideas and musical structures. At the core of this elaborate study is a musicologist highly sensitized to the twentieth-century discipline of semiotics as practised by Charles Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault and others now attempting to understand how writers, thinkers and practitioners in the eighteenth century sought to explain, articulate, codify and translate the sign–object relationship in their own day. This process of mediation brokers the study, just as the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes created the conceptual framework for dynamic conversation, self-reflection and structural comparison necessary to such ‘second-order operations’. In Rumph's words, ‘a major task of this book [is] to define the intellectual, cultural, and social rationales that govern the correlation of signs and objects in Mozart's music’ (8).
An outgrowth of empiricist, experiential philosophy, eighteenth-century sign theory developed as a way of interpreting human thought. Books, novels, poetry, dramas, dialogues, theatrical works, pamphlets, journals, histories, encyclopedias and other forms of information technology transformed the way peoples and societies thought, related and interacted; in altering how the mind represented, ordered and conveyed sensory ideas, they also affected signs, language and cognition. Rumph rides lightly over semiotic theory. As he explains, the sign (that which represents) and the object (that which is represented – Saussure's ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’, in other words) provoke an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign, in the mind of the one being addressed, which in turn creates an interpretant (something that stands in for it). This chain of signification realizes or instantiates the relationship between sign and object, operating at linguistic, gestural, pictorial, religious and other levels. Driving his pursuit of a historically situated model of musical signification for eighteenth-century music is Rumph's dissatisfaction with current analytical approaches that do not take semiotics into account. How did sign theory fit into eighteenth-century intellectual life? What ideas informed the production and reception of meaning in Mozart's music? How did changes in knowledge formation, including epistemological shifts from mimetic models and Cartesian binaries to more complex modes of thinking based on rationalism, philosophical argumentation, experiential learning and sensory awareness affect both philosophical theorizing and musical composition? What ‘shared premises guided philosophers and composers?’ (5). What interdisciplinary connections bind music and contemporary intellectual currents? Through an exploration of the ‘deep terroir from which the different arts and sciences spring’ during the Enlightenment, Rumph is able to reveal in Mozart's music ‘a new understanding about the relationship between senses, signs, and human understanding’ (5).
The author lays out his study in six detailed chapters, two of which appeared earlier as journal articles. In the first chapter he outlines Étienne Bonnot de Condillac's formative theories on the interdependence of signs and thought, which emphasize the importance of the senses, gesture and bodily action to human cognition. Tearing down the Cartesian wall between body and soul, Condillac bequeathed a sensualist paradigm to the philosophes, who in turn waged grammatical debates about language that, as Rumph suggests, ‘lend crucial insights into musical periodicity at Mozart's time’ (35). In short, arms and legs, the dual appendages necessary to movement and dance, enshrine a binary dance-based syntax into galant phrase structure, emancipating music from the voice and permitting composers of Mozart's generation to move beyond baroque rhetoric (42).
Having established the primacy of sensation, Rumph next associates with music the senses of sight and touch, and eventually hearing, as epitomized in the Enlightenment emblem of the living statue. It is but a short leap to the Stone Guest in Don Giovanni, and in chapter 2 he traces how this emblematic Enlightenment subject, a creature of experience, learns to sense, grasp, gesture, speak and interact with others in gaining and extending knowledge, as exemplified in the banquet scene near the end of the opera. As if to sensitize us to the importance of hearing in the first of the hero's two epiphanies (72–77), Mozart inserts three musical recalls to help educate ‘our’ ears.
Chapter 3, ‘Topics in Context’, gets at the crux of the book's thesis. A subset of Mozartean semiotics, topic theory focuses on semantics; that is, musical topoi such as fanfare, French overture and Turkish style signify not by virtue of resemblance, but because they reproduce styles and repertories from elsewhere (83). Although characteristic styles or dance rhythms were probably understood by contemporary listeners, they are curiously absent from eighteenth-century writings and were not regarded as codified symbols. ‘To understand Ratner's topics in their historical context, we need to abandon the anachronistic model of neoclassical rhetoric’ by ‘attending more closely to the physical articulation of the sign and exploring the way in which topics emerge, develop, and interact within the musical syntax’ (94). Building on observations by Kofi Agawu, William E. Caplin and Robert S. Hatten, Rumph poses three main questions: (i) how do topics interact with basic structures of tonality, metre, rhythm, form and texture? (ii) how do social meanings of a topic relate to its more immediate gestural meaning? (iii) when does a musical entity function as a topic and when is it topic-neutral? A detailed structuralist reading of the opening Duettino from Le nozze di Figaro that probes beneath the lexical surface offers up penetrating answers, demonstrating that topics are governed by deep structure. Figaro does not succumb to Susanna's gavotte; rather, they enact a relational Enlightenment. ‘Together they discover a new way of organizing musical time and gesture that transcends gender, class, and topics themselves’ (106).
The title of chapter 4, ‘Mozart and Marxism’, is somewhat misleading, for rather than subscribing to dialectical narratives (as in Susan McClary's well-known article ‘A Musical Dialectic from the Enlightenment: Mozart's Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453, Movement 2’, Cultural Critique 4 (1986), 129–169), Rumph debunks Marxist critiques and seeks instead to understand the elusive nature of Mozartean subjectivity through the lens of Adam Smith's philosophical inquiry into the nature and mechanisms of sympathy. His cryptic conclusion misses the mark by failing to explain fully his larger point about how individual consciousness in the Enlightenment ‘emerges within the collective structures of language’ (137), or how this might yield ideological or materialist readings. Similarly, the fascinating Credo readings presented in chapter 5 skirt important issues pertaining to performance context and place of worship, or how theological arguments within religious circles resonated with Enlightenment thinking. Still, much here stimulates and titillates, such as the isolation of illocutionary performative speech acts in the ‘Coronation’ Mass that shift both music and language from representation to performance. By appearing to abandon belief, Mozart embraces a pluralistic, open-ended, dynamic faith. The final chapter, ‘Archaic Endings’, discusses three contrasting musical examples that pit neoclassical rhetoric against Enlightenment poetics, concluding with a brilliant dialogical reading of conflicting, contradictory tensions in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, richly illustrated here, as elsewhere, with score examples.
Like other path-breaking books, this is an imperfect study. For instance, why concentrate on such a narrow repertory and offer such a limited number of (highly detailed) close readings? If Mozart alone constitutes the focus, why refer to so few works? The concentration on opera seems natural, but why so few references to symphony and concerto, and why a total absence of sonata and string quartet? If one of the main thrusts of the book is to argue ‘that eighteenth-century sign theory makes ample sense of the new instrumental repertory’ (210), then why not substantiate this claim with more examples from untexted genres within the body of the study? Certainly the elasticity of concepts argued for here applies to multiple genres, challenging us to take up Rumph's cause.
Not surprisingly, this study emanates from what might be loosely termed the Berkeley School of Musicology. A student of Kerman and Taruskin, Rumph learned early on that intellectual history is integral to musicological research. Likewise, he believes that it is the task of criticism to engage intellectual currents, since ‘a society's intellectual presuppositions shape every aspect of cultural life, including music’, informing our ‘interpretations of musical composition, theory, and reception’ (10). By questioning basic assumptions about language, rhetoric and signs in standard eighteenth-century musical studies on Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, including those by Leonard Ratner, Wye J. Allanbrook, Agawu, Mark Evan Bonds, James Webster, Elaine Sisman, Hatten, Michael Spitzer, Daniel Heartz, Tom Beghin, Elisabeth Le Guin and Raymond Monelle, Rumph ultimately demonstrates his engagement with a larger community of scholars, enacting a kind of empiricist, sociable model worthy of the Enlightenment enterprise he seeks to understand and share with us: a defining relational act indeed.
