MORE POmO THAN THOU: THE StAtUs OF CULtURAL MEANINGs IN MUsIc

Susan McClary
It happens. Overnight, you change from Young Turk to Old Fogy; the former avant-garde becomes rear-guard action. In the mythologised Sixties, we used to view the 1930s Marxists, with their class-based obsessions, as quaint; another thirty years pass, and members of the Youth Generation who first lived and later theorised the Postmodern Condition get to see their own ideals grow obsolete. In ones bleaker moments, one recalls how Boulez crowed in 1952 that SCHOENBERG IS DEAD, that he had not pushed his own insights far enough, that he had unwittingly perpetuated elements held over from Romanticism.1 For, the so-called New Musicologists now face charges that our work bears the traces of (horror!) Modernism; that, even if we first introduced concepts such as poststructuralism, deconstruction and Deleuzian rhizomes into the discipline, we ourselves no longer qualify as postmodern. Move over: the genuine standard-bearers have arrived! Well, maybe we had it coming. Milton Babbitt must have felt this way, too, when he got pushed aside.2 As anyone who has studied history knows, such waves occur on a regular basis: like clockwork, todays cutting edge becomes tomorrows ancien rgime. To be sure, the Sixties generation has always believed it had some kind of trademark lock on the new, making it necessary for those coming afterwards to set off bombs under us to clear space for themselves. Since I dont want to be part of the revolution that eats its young, I suppose I should just graciously step aside - and, believe me, Im very much looking forward to my retirement! In the meantime, I have mostly retreated into writing about early music, albeit inflected to some extent with my own antiquated version of postmodernism, leaving the battle over the present moment to others. And yet, I would like to leave something of a PoMo valediction behind. In Ecclesiastes we read that there is nothing new under the sun, that all pretences to the contrary amount to nothing more than vanity. OK, but things do change, even if only on the meagre basis of two steps forward and one back. Womens movements may not have brought about all the permanent transformations they have sought, but the very fact that I am presenting this paper testifies to some modicum of progress along those fronts, even if my make-up argues that some of our more radical causes have bitten the dust.3 Similarly, Id like to think that my generations contributions to composition and music studies - call them what you like - will have left some lasting traces. In The Wild One, someone asks the Marlon Brando character: What are you rebelling against? To which he replies: Waddya got? Given that each generation feels compelled to rebel against whatever the previous one upheld, the post of postmodern always hauls along with it the particular vision of its predecessor - which actually makes this but one more version of the modernist paradigm, whereby one gets a thrill by identifying with the Moderns against
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DOI:10.3898/nEWf.66.01.2009

the Ancients. Only, now, it is the Postmoderns against the Moderns. Or, more precisely, the Neo-Postmoderns against Those-Formerly-Known-as-the-Postmoderns, in a pattern of infinite regress. So, against what was my generation of postmodernists rebelling? Forgive me if I begin to sound like the stereotypical curmudgeon railing on about what it was like to walk to school in the snow before the advent of automobiles. But back in the days, composers who wanted to gain any foothold in North American and European circles had to - I repeat: HAD to - submit to serialism. To paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by pitch-class sets. The same cultural imperative had put the kibosh on discussing meanings within musicology: one could perform archival work, make editions or analyse formal properties, but one could not suggest that a piece made any particular cultural difference. In both arenas, music mattered precisely because it had managed to transcend mere meaning. If, in the nineteenth century, all art aspired to the condition of music, mid-twentiethcentury music and musicology aspired to the condition of mathematics. In the matchless words of Joseph Kerman: Articles on music composed after 1950, in particular, appear sometimes to mimic scientific papers in the way that South American bugs and flies will mimic the dreaded carpenter wasp.4 I first started writing on postmodernism in 1985 in the afterword to Jacques Attalis Noise, a book that inspired many musicians to explore beyond the horizon toward which he gestured.5 No one, I think, has any clear idea what Attali actually meant by Compositionthe utopian moment he so vaguely sketches in the last part of his book; but that very vagueness turned out to be its greatest strength. Artists of all stripes who happened to be dissatisfied with the status quo imagined that he was speaking directly to them. As a result of my Attali afterword, I was invited to deliver an address specifically on postmodernism at the New Music America Festival in 1987.6 But others had already blazed the path: I owed many of my ideas and my acquaintance with new music to columns by Tom Johnson and Greg Sandow in The Village Voice during the 1980s. These exuberant chroniclers of what at the time was called the Downtown Scene - the music of Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk - played a role much like that of Robert Schumann, who similarly broadcast to his contemporaries news of the composers and trends they needed to notice. At the same time as this new music was emerging from Downtown Manhattan, a cluster of musicologists was attempting to reopen the forbidden terrain of musical interpretation. I have always regarded these two phenomena - a renewed interest by composers in communicating with audiences and the development of cultural readings in musicology - as aspects of the same movement. That both projects succeeded can be seen in their having been given the status of widely circulating monikers. If the arbiters of good taste in music used to hop up and down in rage at the uniformity of music by Terry Riley or Philip Glass, they now worry over how to draw fine distinctions between the various kinds of music clumped together under the umbrella of minimalism. No one bats an eyelash any more at references to Elvis or Roadrunner cartoons in concert music, and no one ostracises composers who cheerfully embrace tonality. And a cluster of music historians - connected only by the fact that they wanted to study music in its cultural contexts - came to be labelled, for better or for worse, as New Musicologists.
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 Perhaps the greatest sign of success, however, comes from the fact that time has continued to unfold, and another generation of players has entered the field. What are you rebelling against?, we ask them. Waddya got?, they reply. And, of course, what they got is - us! The old postmodernists suddenly get unmasked as modernists against whom the revolution must move to the next inevitable level. So here we are. I mentioned earlier that the post of postmodernism can only be defined against the particular modernism to which it declares itself to be post. At the same time that the meaningseekers of my generation were trying to break through the prohibition against discussing readings in music, many literary critics were trying to escape what they saw as the too-obvious content in novels. A wave of European theorists worked to demonstrate the ways in which language always defers the possibility of our ever really knowing definitively what something signifies. Roland Barthes announced the death of the author; Jacques Derrida showed the vulnerability of intended meanings to the shadow figure of the supplement that always destabilises utterances; Paul de Man demonstrated the operations of hidden tropes that organise writing; Richard Schechner shifted the focus from the textual to the performative. One of the consequences of the swerve toward theory was the emergence of a generation that boasted of never reading novels or poetry. They still engaged in close readings, but of theoretical rather than literary texts. This skepticism concerning the enterprise of discussing meanings now appears precisely the posture needed to refute the New Musicology.7 What meanings? You really still believe that music has meanings?! Something like this been-there-done-that attitude has also infected the reception of new music in many places as if poststructuralist novelty, in and of itself, suffices to confer value upon a composer or composition. To paraphrase St Pauls statement on circumcision in his letter to the Galatians, however, neither postmodernism availeth anything nor non-postmodernism but a new creation. What matters in both composition and scholarship is the contribution to culture of something that invites human beings to understand their world in new terms. I might point out also that the literary theorists to whom younger scholars refer in their resistance to discussions of meanings themselves scrutinised Balzac, Proust and Rousseau in their writings, which advocated digging beneath the manifest surface of texts to locate substrata of cultural ideologies. This was - let us recall - the old Tel Quel group, and if they had repudiated the orthodoxies of their youth, it was not so much in order to profess meaninglessness as to advocate a Hermeneutics of Suspicion. Whatever we choose to call the music of the recent past, it has continued to make use of the precepts initially touted as postmodern: eclecticism, mixing of popular and elite styles, access to sonorities identified with standard tonality, non-linear procedures. I hasten to add that any criteria for musical postmodernism we might bring to the table already manifested themselves in Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomsons Four Saints in Three Acts (in some ways still the mother of us all), in Stravinskys neo-classicism, in the collaborations of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and in nearly everything penned by Leonard Bernstein. If we had grounded our conceptions of modernism in these artists, we would scarcely have needed to go postal. Yet, in many parts of Europe, North America and Australia, the stranglehold of serialism was such that composers in the 1970s actually risked their careers in departing from that mandate. To the extent that music theorists and musicologists had forged a historical narrative
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according to which Western music threw off the shackles, not only of patronage but of anything that might connect music with its cultural contexts, they aided and abetted that stranglehold. It is this radical sense of autonomy - by which music transcends human meanings, rendering it exempt from interpretation - that my generation of postmodernists rejected. As someone raised within fundamentalist Christianity, I recognise this dogmatic stance all too easily. Lets call it capital A Autonomy. All the small A versions are fine with me: I dont want the government, the university, or anyone else telling composers how to write. But Ill go to my grave railing against capital A Autonomy, which demands blind acceptance of a very particular sub-set of human endeavours.8 It is one thing (and not necessarily a good thing) to cordon off the scriptures as sacrosanct; but Bach, Beethoven and Boulez? Huh? So, what got accomplished in the 1970s wave of musical postmodernism? For one thing, the international style that purported to have disdained all special interests came to seem like one particularly stringent special interest. And with that barrier out of the way, myriad new agendas flooded the scene. Not coincidentally, this reversal occurred at the same time as identity politics were on the rise. Suddenly it was possible - even desirable - to compose from the subjectposition of a woman, an Australian, a gay man, an African American or a mystic from the former Soviet Union. If the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment - Alle Menschen werden Brder, in Schillers words - no longer obtained, we now experienced, in exchange, the emergence of as many different musical dialects as we could imagine. The cultural contexts that used to seem irrelevant to the analysis of music became indispensable elements in understanding - the very basis for analysis. Moreover, if such elements proved crucial to the understanding of contemporary music, they came to seem just as crucial to approaches to earlier music. When we begin to examine musical representations reaching back to the Renaissance, we find that musicians have always recognised the Self as a construct - discontinuous, conflicted, forged of incompatible elements. The once-consistent faades of Bachs music now appear as eclectic mosaics cobbled together from anything he could get his hands on - from Palestrina motets and dances from the court of Louis XIV, to Italian operas, Rosicrucian conundrums and Scarlattis hand-crossing stunts: all in the service, somehow, of Luthers church and a burgeoning German nationalist agenda. And music that had never stood the test of Schenkerian graphing - Hildegards Gnostic-tinged sequences in praise of the Virgin, Frescobaldis time-warping toccatas, nearly everything French, and even hip-hop (probably the most durable manifestation of musical postmodernism) - began to command the attention of scholars, performers and listeners. Relieved of a one-size-mustfit-all aesthetic, musicians and musicologists found themselves free to explore different worlds, both old and new. There is a potential downside to all this liberation, of course. With the acknowledgement of meaning comes the possibility - even the necessity - of public debate. A previous generation had bought exemption from criticism by claiming purely formal status. But when explicit articulations of cultural ideals circulate, they raise the same issues that provoke divisions in everyday life. Charges of appropriation, opportunism or sexism now litter journals that formerly focused their attention strictly on structural complexity. Like film, literature, painting, or any other medium, music matters most when it enters the cultural bloodstream and engenders intense,
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often conflicting reactions. Some artists still try to have it both ways: John Zorn festooned his album covers with pictures of mutilated Asians, then wrapped himself in the flag of capital A Autonomy when criticised by people who objected.9 Welcome back to the social world! To insist upon the social, however, is not to reduce musical expression to the merely social (as if there is anything mere about the social!). The music itself still matters: the best of intentions may produce inert results, and sometimes an ethically questionable enterprise bristles with technical and rhetorical skill. Despite considerable misgivings, I have written on John Zorns work and have used my limited influence to help him secure awards.10 I may not like everything he does, but the guy knows how to shove notes around and he has a musical imagination second to none. So, one is left weighing pros, on one hand, cons, on the other - just as one does with any number of troubling but brilliant artists of the past. If most of the music circulating today bears traces of the postmodernist moment, then we no longer accomplish much by simply demonstrating a pieces postmodernity. Even twenty years ago, I worried about the gentrification of postmodernisms more consequential challenges the sacrifice of a deconstructive edge for hellzapoppin eclecticism - and that gentrification has transpired. Nearly everything travels under the banner of postmodernism: its the mainstream. What matters, as always, is the cultural work it performs through the medium of sound. For the remainder of this paper, I want to focus on a recent posterchild of postmodernist music: Osvaldo Golijovs La Pasin segn San Marcos, which premiered in Stuttgart in 2000.11 The son of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants to Argentina, Golijov studied in Israel and also with those godfathers of eclecticism, George Crumb and Oliver Knussen. Several of his previous compositions, such as Yiddishbbuk and The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, had traded on his Jewish identity: an identity he forged as an admittedly invented tradition from memories his grandfather shared with him, his residency in Tel Aviv, his research into klezmer and Hebrew chant, and chance encounters with other musicians.12 He expresses no claim to authenticity, even if the topics he chooses or his ways of fleshing them out often resonate with some aspect of his multi-faceted background. La Pasin was one of four new renderings of that genre commissioned by the International Bachakademie Stuttgart and Helmuth Rilling in honour of the 250th anniversary of Bachs death (the others tapped were Wolfgang Rihm, Sofia Gubaidulina and Tan Dun). Each of the contributors brought a new slant to the tradition, whether through Asian or Eastern Orthodox idioms or through the inclusion of poetry by Paul Celan. It was Golijovs version, however, that took audiences by storm and made the composer the Great White Hope for the survival of Classical Music.13 Imagining the gospel narrative as a pageant presented by Latin-American rather than Lutheran congregants, Golijov assembled a vast range of folkloric and popular music, dance and poetry to produce a reading of the gospel not soon forgotten. As with his Jewish pieces, Golijov freely acknowledges in La Pasin his reliance on research and collaboration, though he simultaneously encourages listeners to perceive his Jewish-Argentinean background as lending some kind of grounding to a heritage more constructed than real. For purposes of this project, he had to study the New Testament for the first time and also learn something of the Bach settings so familiar to most European listeners.14 But his very alienation from these texts allowed him to make new connections, to read the script anew. What emerged
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was a dizzying mix of flamenco, medieval liturgical drama, the Jewish Kaddish, dances based in Brazilian martial arts and Afro-Cuban chant styled after Yoruban ceremonies. In this he selfconsciously parallels Bachs own penchant for eclectic collage - a characteristic we rarely notice because the intervening three centuries have made his secular dances and Italian love songs all just sound like baroque church music. But Bach scored the results of his scavenger hunt in such a way as to allow for performance by a standard ensemble. By contrast, Golijov collaborated with a number of prominent artists who specialise in the idioms he wanted to deploy, most notably Luciana Souza (a famous Brazilian jazz singer and composer) and Reynaldo Gonzlez Fernndez (an electrifying musician and dancer from Cuba). Like Golijov himself, however, his collaborators have long since circulated within international markets and North-American academic institutions. Providing moments of group expression is the Schola Cantorum de Carcas, which routinely performs European Renaissance masses as well as Latin-American folk music; and the powerful drumming that drives the piece was developed largely under the direction of Mikael Ringquist (hows that for a Hispanic name!). If the result is a tapestry of startlingly exotic vocal and percussion sounds, no actual ethnics were harmed in the making of this recording. The first texted portion of La Pasin presents the words of Christ as he warns his apostles, Watch, therefore, for you know not when the Lord will arrive. Sung not by a soloist but by the chorus, the strophic Anuncio unfolds as an amalgam between a chorale and an indigenous procession. Before the chorus completely cadences, Mark the Evangelist breaks in to begin the narrative itself: Two days before the Passover, the feast of the unleavened bread, the priests and scribes sought how they might take him by craft and put him to death. And here, courtesy of the exceptional vocal abilities of Gonzlez Fernndez, we pivot from our rural collective to the voice of a Yoruban priest conjuring up African deities. But Golijov - always unpredictable - also transports us to what sounds like the twelfth-century world of Hildegard von Bingen for the institution of the Eucharist. Bach, of course, inserted reflective arias into his passions - arias designed to invite the reflection of his congregants. He rarely risked putting newly-invented poetry into Christs mouth, reserving these interpolations for occasions of particular grief felt by the apostles. Golijovs two moments of lyrical expansion occur to express the shame of Judas and Peter. The first of these is based on an anonymous text: I wish to forswear this world completely and return again to live, mother of my heart! To see whether in a new world I could find more truth. Sung by Luciana Souza to a cancin by Nia de los Peines, this set piece draws on the melancholy of Andalusian flamenco to present a remorseful interiority). Peter laments his betrayal through La Descolorida, a poem by Galician poet Rosala de Castro: Colourless moon, like the colour of pale gold; You see me here and I would not want you to see me from the heights above. Take me, silently, in your ray, to the space of your journey. In this number (first commissioned as an independent composition by Brigham Young University for performance), Golijov brings us closest to the realm of European opera. He claims to model his music for La Descolorida after Franois Couperins Leons de tnbres, with its strange melismatic renderings of the verse numbers in Hebrew (Aleph, Beth, Gimel, etc.). In other words, the flamenco-like wail that opens the piece descends from a French baroque
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setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, though the song itself also recalls Normas Casta diva or Desdemonas Ave Maria, or those passages in Stravinskys Oedipus that sound tantalisingly just like name your favourite aria. In the composers words, The song is at once a slow-motion ride on a cosmic horse, a homage to Couperins melismas in his Lessons of Tenebrae, velvet bells coming from three different churches, heaven as seen once by Yeats, a death lullaby, and ladder of Jacobs dream. But the strongest inspiration for La Descolorida was Dawn Upshaws rainbow of a voice, and I wanted to give her a piece so quietly radiant that it would bring an echo of the single tear that Schubert brings without warning in his voicing of a G major chord.15 Postmodern? Oh yeah! La Pasin is elaborately referential and ostentatiously eclectic. But that does not imply that its meanings are exhausted in the identification of its parts. There still remain rhetoric, theatrical effects, performance (in all senses of the word), occasions, audiences, and the specific manipulation of sound that makes up music. Will it stand the test of time? Who knows? Who would have imagined that Honky Tonk Woman would be a timeless classic or that generations would keep playing air drum to the solo in In-a-gadda-da-vida? La Pasin kicked the butts of classical-music critics who didnt even remember they had such a component to their anatomy, and that is worthy of note. But is Golijovs piece opportunistic? The musics gathered by ethnomusicologists came to be marketed commercially as World Beat, and that legacy is now harvested by composers for the concert stage. Is Golijovs piece guilty of exoticism? Richard Taruskin has explained how urban Russian composers in the early twentieth century merrily orientalised themselves for the benefit of Parisian audiences eager for primitivist treats,16 and Carl Dahlhaus once described folk materials as an untapped reservoir of material that virtually cried out for exploitation by Europeans who had exhausted their own materials.17 By virtue of what does the son of Russian immigrants to Argentina grab onto musics from all over Latin America and channel them as his own? Does the aesthetic pay-off for those who like the piece compensate for any of the ethical questions it may raise? I have been struggling with that problem with respect to Georges Bizets Carmen for twenty years, and Im not sure Im a lot closer to solving it.18 As Walter Benjamin said, There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism19 (except maybe Honky Tonk Woman, of course). I confess that I like Golijovs music - even as it raises, movement by movement, all the issues cultural theorists rightly debate. If it provides musical pleasure and perhaps even spiritual insight for some, it also hits many of the crucial faultlines connected with class privilege and race that remain so raw in our time. Golijov envisioned a piece of concert music that foregrounded the voices of Latin Americans and the Spanish language, which remains so marginalised in the European canon. But does he thereby ventriloquise? Perhaps he does, but then the alternative is to self-censor to the point of returning to the old, purely formalist days, when the only safe position was that of furthering the abstract cause of progress in someones notion of the purely musical. Which raises, once again, the question of why humans need music, why evolution dedicated large portions of the brain - and not only of those who have mastered pitch-class theory - to the processing of sound.
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 Nobel laureate Toni Morrison once said in defence of her decision to write about slavery in her novel Beloved: When I had problems, I thought: If they can live it, I can write about it. I refuse to believe that that period, or that thing [slavery] is beyond art. Because the consequences of practically everything we do, art alone can stand up to.20 We may wish to believe that our postmodernity has landed us in a more enlightened position, historically, but, alas, postmodernity has not cured the wounds of racism, poverty, misogyny or religious warfare. If anything, the twenty-first century has seen an intensification of these problems. We have not outgrown our needs for community, beauty, spiritual nourishment and mutual understanding; were not beyond these, and we never will be. And why must we chatter on about music, rather than just let the drastic experience conk us over the head? No one has ever suggested that we replace the power of performance with verbiage. But many of us are historians as well as listeners, and learning how music has operated in times past and present is one of the musicologists tasks; indeed, if it is not, then we must concede that music has had no real impact on culture as it has unfolded. Many of us are performers, and engaging critically with scores or extant traditions allows us to break new paths - paths that may, in their own turn, deeply influence listeners in the future. Finally, many of us are composers who sometimes find it useful to clear a space through verbal articulations in order to make it possible for listeners to grasp why we need new music, why the repertoires left by Mozart and Beethoven do not suffice. Which returns us not to the whims but to the duties of the critical musicologist. Without question, undermining cultural conventions can be powerful, but it can also be selflimiting. A few years ago, Gayatri Spivak realised that the language-games she displayed in her gloriously gnarly prose made her work on political subalterns completely opaque to those she hoped to help. As a consequence, even she - the woman whose introduction to Of Grammatology managed to be more impenetrable than Derrida himself - decided to change her tune; sometimes, she confessed later, one just needs to speak plainly and intelligibly.21 To locate ones politics in the rejection of communication -artistic or critical - is just to sign up again with modernist obscurity, even if in the name of ever more post-postmodernism. As I have already suggested, it is in the nature of cultural practices to spark debates. With the return of cultural meaning to composition, performance and musicology, disagreements and squabbling become inevitable. Some may long, I suppose, for the placid world of universal consensus, in which newspaper critics had no other job than to comment on whether or not the piccolo played sharp last night. But I would prefer to hear people fight over Madonnas sacrilegious imagery, John Zorns love of violence or Osvaldo Golijovs exploitation of the exotic. I have no quarrel with meanings that differ from mine - indeed, I welcome them. All I ask is this: please dont drag me back to the position whereby music didnt, cannot, and dont mean shit. Gimme that Old Time Postmodernism!

Notes
1. Pierre Boulez, Schoenberg est mort, Notes of an Apprenticeship, Herbert Weinstock (trans), New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1968, pp268-76. 2. See Susan McClary, Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition, Cultural Critique, 12, MORE POMO THAn THOU 35

Spring (1989): 57-81. 3. This paper was originally presented as a keynote address at the Music and Postmodern Cultural Theory conference held at the University of Melbourne on 5-6 December, 2006. 4. Joseph Kerman, How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out (1980); reprinted in Kerman, Write All These Down: Essays in Music Criticism, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1994, p14. 5. Susan McClary, The Politics of Silence and Sound, afterword to Jacques Attali, Noise, Brian Massumi (trans), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985, pp149-58. 6. Susan McClary, The Gentrification of Postmodernism, New Music American Festival, Philadelphia, October 1987. 7. The recent attack against hermeneutics in music is best represented by Carolyn Abbate, Music - Drastic or Gnostic?, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004): 505-36. See the response by Michael James Puri in his review of Berthold Hoeckners Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 59, 2, Summer (2006): 488-501. 8. See Janet Wolff, The Ideology of Autonomous Art, foreword to Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (eds), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp1-12. This collection stands as the opening salvo of the new musicology. 9. See Ellie Hisama, Postcolonialism on the Make: The Music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie and John Zorn, Popular Music, 12, 2 (1993): 91-104. A useful summary of the subsequent debate appears in Denise Hamilton, Zorns Garden Sprouts Discontent, Los Angeles Times, Calendar Section, August 15, 1994, p9. 10. See Susan McClary, Reveling in the Rubble: The Postmodern Condition, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2000. 11. Osvaldo Golijov, La Pasin segn San Marcus, recording of the premiere available on Hnssler Classic, 2001. 12. See his statements in the liner notes to The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, Nonesuch Records, 1997. 13. See, for instance, the review by Alex Ross who wrote in response to a performance in Boston in 2001: Pasin drops like a bomb on the belief that classical music is an exclusively European art. It has a revolutionary air, as if musical history were starting over, with new, sensuous materials and in a new, affirmative tone, Alex Ross, New Yorker, 15 March, 2001. 14. See his statements in the liner notes to La Pasin, op. cit. 15. Comments in the published score of La Descolorida, Universal Edition, 2000. 16. Richard Taruskin, Entoiling the Falconet: Russian Musical Orientalism in Context, in Jonathan Bellman, (ed), The Exotic in Western Music, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998, pp194-217. 17. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, J. Bradford Robinson (trans), Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1989, p304. 18. See particularly Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 19. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations, Harry Zohn (trans), New York, Schocken Books, 1977, p256. 20. Gail Caldwell, Author Toni Morrison Discusses her Latest Novel Beloved [reprinted from the Boston Globe, 6 October 1987], in Danielle Taylor-Guthrie (ed) Conversations with Toni Morrison, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1994, p245. 21. Comment in a talk given by Gayatri Spivak at the Center for Criticism and Theory, Dartmouth College, 1993.

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