\"Expressive Potential\" and Music Criticism

"Expressive Potential" and Music Criticism

Edward T. Cone's book The Composer's Voice, published in 1974, is mostly about musical agency and the persona in music, also offering an account of listeners' identification with these entities. Cone's book has been foundational for subsequent studies of musical agency, musical narrative, and related topics; these areas of research have been productive from the 1980s to the present.
However, in 1974, Cone's interest in agency and persona was unusual. The Composer's Voice explored issues that pervaded music criticism, for instance in the English-language tradition from Tovey to Kerman and Rosen, but which had not been studied at a theoretical level with its own vocabulary.
Cone recognizes the unusual qualities of his book at the beginning of its Epilogue, where he anticipates that readers will be "dissatisfied," for two reasons: first, because his account relies on "metaphor and analogy," and second, because, while depicting music as "a medium of communication," Cone has not addressed "the basic question of what music means or expresses."
Having anticipated these responses, Cone responds by agreeing with both, but goes on to explain why these aspects of his account are appropriate. "Figures of speech," he says, are inevitable when one interprets "nonverbal and unverbalizable phenomena." At this point, Cone's argument moves quickly; it is not clear, in fact, that his account should be understood as metaphor and analogy. Later in the Epilogue, Cone writes that "musical utterances" are "artistic creations to be construed as simulated—as emanating from personas or characters who subsist only by virtue of the musical composition." (160) Such a statement does not seem figurative; rather, it points toward a theoretical account of musical fiction, representation, or imagination.
As for musical meaning, Cone states, plausibly, that it is possible to develop an account of certain aspects of music, agencies and personas, without directly addressing issues of meaning or content.
Nonetheless, Cone's Epilogue goes on to sketch an account of musical meaning. The main argument of the book already implies that musical agents do things, and that personas may speak, or may serve as subjects of experience. These categories—actions, utterances, and experiences—are diverse. In the Epilogue, Cone brings them closer together by focusing on the concept of expressive gesture, common to both speech and action. Following critic, poet, and former Princeton colleague R. P. Blackmur, Cone suggests that language has gestural qualities as well as referential ones. And "a physical gesture," he says, "is an action that emulates an utterance." Thus, expressive gesture falls within the range of both utterances and actions. Cone proposes: "If music is a language at all, it is a language of gesture: of direct actions, of pauses, of startings and stoppings, of rises and falls, of tenseness and slackness, of accentuations." (164)
Cone continues by emphasizing that the meaning of gesture is context-dependent, more so than many linguistic meanings. He points out that "words like 'oh' and 'ah,' while perfectly intelligible in context, have no core of meaning that can be independently conveyed." (162) Similarly, "Like a sigh, a musical gesture has no specific reference, it conveys no specific message. But like a sigh, it can fit into many contexts which in return can explain its significance. The expressive content of the musical gesture, then, depends on its context. Deprived of context, the gesture expresses nothing; it is only potentially expressive." (165)
Not only are individual musical gestures, such as a sighing appoggiatura, dependent on context for much of their meaning; Cone affirms that entire compositions are similarly context-dependent. As he puts it, "a composition represents a human action, and only in a context of wider human activity is its content revealed." (165) This is vague, of course, and Cone moves immediately to identify different types of context that can provide content. Not surprisingly, he turns first to the verbal texts of vocal music and program music, where words give specific contexts for attributing content to music. At the same time, Cone notes that the verbal meanings point toward certain possibilities within the broader "expressive potential" of the music, and he suggests that listeners may be aware of this play between specificity and potential.
Moving to non-programmatic instrumental music, Cone identifies individual listeners as the source of context. "Each listener supplies his own context, out of the store of his own experience … We subconsciously ascribe to the music a content based on the correspondence between musical gestures and their patterns, on the one hand, and isomorphically analogous experiences, inner or outer, on the other." (169) Again, "the content of instrumental music is revealed to each listener by the relation between the music and the personal context he brings to it." (171)
Through these statements, Cone creates a duality between texted and non-texted music. Texted music is relatively fixed in its meaning. Non-texted music is also meaningful, but varies significantly in its meaning from one listener to another, because its meaning depends on individualized personal contexts. Perhaps Cone over-states the difference here. Verbal texts themselves, especially poetic texts, vary in their meanings for different individuals, a fact that Cone does not mention, and so they cannot provide a secure basis for fixed musical meanings. As for non-texted music, important work subsequent to The Composer's Voice has shown how shared, public meanings exist, for instance in the topics described by Ratner in 1979, or the plot archetypes described by Newcomb in 1983. Nonetheless, Cone is right that texted works offer guidance for interpretation, and non-texted music is comparatively accommodating to diverse personal associations.
Cone's idea of expressive potential undermines the critical project of identifying the meaning of a musical composition. If meanings vary by individual listeners, and also, as Cone adds, at different times in one listener's life, then there is no such thing as the determinate meaning of a composition. This conclusion is hard to avoid. Still, Cone wants to retain the idea of what he calls "the total content of a complex and profound composition." In doing so, he gives weight to the structure of the music: "Superficially divergent as one listener's context may seem from another's, they will be linked by their common isomorphism with the musical structure, and hence with each other. And deeper analysis should reveal, below the surface differences, some common ground of expression that in turn suggests the nature of the complete potential." (171) Cone offers a pluralistic account of musical meaning, but still hopes to know something about the "total content" or "complete potential" of a composition. Apparently this can be approached through "deep analysis" of "structure." In these ideas, I find a conflict between Cone's reasoning, which leads him to a pluralistic conclusion, and his desire for a determinate object of critical knowledge.
Despite Cone's turn to structure as a key to determinate meaning, he distrusts formalism. As he puts it, "Many [sophisticated listeners] claim to enjoy music as pure structure alone. I doubt whether this is ever possible, for even when our conscious attention is entirely occupied with following the formal design, our subconscious, in Proustian fashion, is still creating a context—nonverbal but highly personal." (169) According to Cone, there are no formalist listeners; at most, there are listeners who are unaware that they draw on personal experience to give content to the music. Thus, even when Cone proposes a notion of "complete meaning" based on "structure," he maintains a distinct account of listening experience and variable meaning.

Cone returned to expressive potential in "Schubert's Promissory Note," an essay published in 1982. The fact of this return is notable in itself. Usually, Cone starts fresh in every article or book, elaborating new concepts each time. It is less common for one of his texts to build on ideas from another.
The concept of expressive potential, in The Composer's Voice, could be read as an afterthought, an attempt to tie up a loose end. It is more central to the newer essay.
Apart from the idea of expressive potential, the conceptualization of the essay differs from that in The Composer's Voice. Notably, the concept of musical gesture does not appear; nor do the persona or musical agents. Instead, Cone frames his argument in Wilson Coker's distinction between "congeneric" and "extrageneric" meaning, that is, "purely musical relationships" and "the supposed reference of a musical work to non-musical objects, events, moods, emotions, and so on." (234) As before, Cone emphasizes structure, identifying "the comprehensive design" of a composition as "the locus of expression," and stating firmly that "verbalization of true content … must depend on close structural analysis." (235) After lengthy, insightful analysis of Schubert's Moment musical No. 6, with plenty of technical detail, Cone asks about the expressive potential of the music. To answer, he begins with a relatively abstract description, associating the music with "the injection of a strange, unsettling element into an otherwise peaceful situation." (239) Then he moves to more personal associations. He finds "the arrival of the 'foreign element' to be symbolic of the occurrence of a disquieting thought to one of a tranquil, easy-going nature. Disquieting, but at the same time exciting, for it suggests unusual and interesting courses of action." (240) And then he becomes more specific: "it can be taken as a model of the effect of vice on a sensitive personality." (240) In such comments, which take up about one page of a nine-page essay, Cone creates a complex moment of self-disclosure and discretion. According to Cone's argument, this passage about disquieting thoughts, vice, temptation, obsession, and addiction reflects the personal context that Cone brings to the composition, allowing him to find his own meaning for the music. But the passage is non-specific about the nature of the vice, and about the relation of the life-events Cone adduces to Cone himself. That is, Cone might be thinking about events in his own life, but might be thinking about events he knows of in some other way.
By Cone's standards, this is already a surprisingly revealing passage; I would not expect him to say more, given professional norms of musicology and Cone's own personality. Still, there is a gap between the intimacy of musical experience that Cone's generalizations imply, and his reserved exemplification.
Cone's essay concludes by moving from Cone's personal associations to Schubert's biography, asking: "What personal experiences might Schubert himself have considered relevant to the expressive significance of his own composition?" (240) Now, Cone's account becomes more explicit, as he relates the events of the piece to Schubert's syphilis. The unspecified "vice" of Cone's personal interpretation, fascinating but dangerous, becomes, in relation to Schubert, sexual exploration.
Cone's suggestions about Schubert are bold. At the same time, they draw attention away from the discussion of expressive potential, which now finds itself tucked between two traditional sources of critical authority, a detailed technical analysis and a suggestion about the composer's own interpretation of the music.
The idea of expressive potential is subversive, counter-cultural, in relation to traditional music criticism. It discourages the quest for the unitary meaning of a composition, affirming instead that there may be many meanings, just as there are many listeners. It relocates meaning from "the music itself" to a complex negotiation between the music and each listener's personal psyche; the interaction between listener and music may be as intimate as a reflection on sexual temptation and, as Cone notes, may not be fully conscious for the listener.
We should be grateful to Cone for this striking suggestion about musical meaning. At the same time, we should note Cone's tendency to distract himself, and perhaps his readers, from his more disquieting suggestions, as he confines his ideas to an Epilogue, or turns to ideas of "total content," "comprehensive design," and the composer's interpretation.

Now I want to turn to two practices where I find continuity with Cone's idea of expressive potential. I believe these practices confirm the value of Cone's proposal, and also allow us to explore beyond Cone's brief treatments.
To begin, I can turn to Music and Your Mind: Listening with a New Consciousness, by Helen Bonny and Louis Savary. By pleasant coincidence, this book appeared in 1973, around the same time as The Composer's Voice.
Music and Your Mind comes from an early stage in the work of Helen Bonny, who, over the following years, would develop an influential model of music therapy, the Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music. Unlike Bonny's later work, the book addresses general audiences, offering readers a range of special exercises in music listening and mental imagery, some for groups, some for individuals.
To begin such an exercise, one relaxes and enters an altered state of consciousness. Then one listens to music, preferably lying down with eyes closed, and with a focus on one's own experience. The book lists specific repertory for each exercise; the music is mostly classical, with an emphasis on orchestral music in Romantic styles. The authors provide imagery to guide the listener's associations, though the suggestions vary in their specificity. So, for instance, a group of listeners may be told to imagine a meadow, and then to find a stream and follow it until it reaches a pool with a waterfall, and so on. Musical suggestions for this exercise include movements of Brahms symphonies and Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. (69-70) Or an individual may imagine walking up to a house and pausing to notice details, altering them if she wishes, and then entering the house to explore and, again, make changes, finally populating the house with the people she would like to see there. Recommended music includes the Brandenburg Concertos, guitar music, Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp, and others. (57-58) The use of such specific imaginative scenarios shows the influence of Hanscarl Leuner's Guided Affective Imagery, a model that would be less important for Bonny's later work. Some other exercises in the book are more general. In one, a listener is invited to imagine the music filling her body, then overflowing; finally the "whole body pours out music. You are its author. You are transforming what is entering you, and it emerges as an expression of your own inner self." (63) Still, despite the instructions, the authors state that each listener should feel free to follow her own experience wherever it may go. Finally, after listening, one returns to ordinary consciousness, and then takes some time for reflection on what has happened.
Such experiences, the authors explain, can help listeners "to develop self-awareness, clarify personal values, release blocked-up psychic energy sources, enrich group spirit, bring about deep relaxation, and foster religious experience." (15)
In a broad sense, these experiences explore the expressive potential of the music used; thus, there is a general affinity with Cone's ideas. There are obvious differences—the preliminary stage of "induction" to create an altered consciousness; the use of verbal scenarios to guide listeners; above all, the strong, unambivalent emphasis on personal exploration and self-discovery. The verbal instructions turn the music selections into program music, shaping the contexts that listeners will bring. But the instructions are relatively vague, intended more to start a flow of images than to limit the experience, and each listener will draw on her own sensibility to shape the details. Bonny and Savary note that this kind of listening can bring up unconscious material, and they warn that "with heightened consciousness everything is intensified and magnified—positive and negative experiences alike. For example, if during a selection characterized by joy there are a few measures of sad or somber music, the listener in altered consciousness can experience a strong mood change at that point, while the normal listener would not be affected at all." (141)
With further experience, Helen Bonny came to feel that music was most effective as therapy in a one-on-one setting, adding a third element to the dyad of therapist and client or, as she called them, "guide" and "traveler." In her fully-developed model of Guided Imagery and Music, a client and therapist begin a session by speaking together about issues the client may wish to address. The therapist selects appropriate music, relevant in some way to those issues. Then the client lies down on a sofa or carpeted floor, with a light covering, and closes her eyes. There is a brief relaxation induction. This can be much less elaborate than the procedures in Music and Your Mind; Bonny came to believe that it was music itself, not the preliminary proceedings, that induced an altered state. Then the therapist begins to play the recorded music. This will typically be a program of selected compositions, chosen to suggest a series of moods or experiences; many pre-existing programs exist, assembled by Bonny herself or others trained in her methods.
As the traveler listens, the guide will ask questions from time to time. The guide no longer suggests imagery—no more meadows and houses—but elicits experiential description, including imagery, from the traveler. Bonny recommends orienting the client, before the session, in these terms: "Tell yourself that you would like to go with the music wherever it leads. Don't try to manufacture an experience, just let it happen… Simply allow yourself to follow the music. Your associations to the flow of the music, expressed in feelings, or projected onto inner imagery, provide your experience… Try not to listen to the music in an intellectual way, but allow yourself to become one with it." (278) Typically, a guide might wait through the first minute of music or more, and then, leaning in and speaking softly, ask, "What are you experiencing now?" The guide will draw out details, with questions like "How is that for you?" or "Where do you experience that in your body?" If the guide senses that the traveler is losing contact with the music, she may say, for example, "Allow the music to support you with that." In general, the guide tries to keep the traveler in a present-moment experience; for instance, if the traveler begins to reminisce about something in the past, the guide may ask, "And what is it like for you now, to think of that?" Many of the guide's responses will be minimal—"Ah." "Say more." "Stay with that." Rather than distracting the traveler, the guide works to keep the traveler engrossed in her own experience.
Bonny developed Guided Imagery and Music as a form of psychotherapy. Freudian free association was one of her models; like free association, these listening experiences open the client to unconscious material. Sessions are often emotionally intense, as the traveler encounters strong feelings, surprising images, and powerful memories. Often, though not always, the perceptible organization of the music helps to contain these feelings, structuring them in a way that makes it possible to experience them with relative safety. Each program of musical selections ends with music intended to decrease the intensity of the experience and bring the traveler closer to ordinary consciousness.
Clients for Guided Imagery and Music are not typically musicians. They may describe their experiences in various ways—as emotion, kinesthetic sensations, sensory images, full-blown fantasy narratives, or vivid memories. As they travel, they may not be clearly aware of the music. But Bonny was certain that the music still shaped the traveler's experience. "The music may become a background," she wrote, addressing an imagined client. "Let it. It will still have its effect on your mood and help structure your experience." (278)
Clients travel in many different ways. To illustrate an experience that could, at first, seem unmusical, I shall quote from a case history by Marilyn Clark. In the tenth of twenty sessions, the client, Diane, found herself returning in imagination to her "chaotic childhood home. A quiet moment with her mother is interrupted by the family returning from a day at the beach. Father comes home and begins to put demands on Mother. Diane goes into a rage and threatens to attack anyone who does not show respect to her mother." Such thoughts may seem remote from music. But add the information that Diane was listening to the first movement of Brahms's Second Piano Concerto, and one can suppose that Diane's fantasy tracked the music closely, as the Concerto's deceptively calm opening gave way to alarming volatility and frequent evocations of passionate anger.
Let's listen to the opening of the Brahms Concerto. I want to draw your attention to the remarkable affective variety within a few minutes of music, each implied mood vivid, perhaps over-intense, the contrasts often harshly unmediated. And as you listen, recall Bonny's and Savary's observation that "with heightened consciousness," that is, in the non-ordinary consciousness resulting from deep relaxation, "everything is intensified and magnified." This music can easily evoke powerful, confusing feelings and associations.
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The use of such music reflects an important fact about Bonny's approach. The immediate goal of listening in a therapy session is not relaxation. This movement by Brahms is not relaxing. Often, the therapeutic goal is to arouse uncomfortable feelings, giving access to content so that the client can work with it.
As indicated, Bonny suggests that listeners may be caught up in sensation or fantasy, and relatively unaware of the musical sound; but they are nonetheless guided by it. Recall, now, Cone's description of listeners whose formalist preoccupations hide from them their unconscious activity of personal contextualization. I suggest that, in Cone's and Bonny's ideas, we are dealing with a single conception of music listening. According to this conception, listeners follow the sounds of music, and respond by providing personal associations that fill out the meaning of the music. When listeners do this, they may tilt their attention toward the personal material that the music evokes, as when the music becomes a background; or they may tilt their attention toward the musical sound, as do self-avowed formalists.
To use the Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music, a therapist needs thorough familiarity with the musical selections that will shape a client's experience. In Bonny's tradition, the established way of studying music places little emphasis on scores or technical analysis. Instead, the therapist spends a lot of time listening to the music, in various states of mind—sometimes alert, sometimes writing down observations, sometimes in the dreamy altered state of a traveler. And, in her professional work, such a therapist will learn continuously about the varying responses of different clients, which are never fully predictable. The therapeutic practice of Guided Imagery and Music is, among other things, an enviable laboratory for the study of expressive potential. These procedures offer a nice alternative to Cone's insistence that interpretation must start with technical analysis. Instead, interpretation can begin with intuitive responses and associations, one's own and those of others; these could provide criteria of relevance for subsequent technical observations.
As Helen Bonny's sense of Guided Imagery and Music developed, she gave increasing emphasis to its status as a professional therapeutic method, and she came to feel that her early book, inviting readers to experiment with musical effects, was reckless. The presence of a carefully trained expert is crucial, she believed, when one unleashes the psychological power of classical music.
This caution depends on a strict distinction between the Guided Imagery session and ordinary, non-medicalized musical experiences. But I believe Bonny exaggerates this distinction. Music often has powerful effects, whether or not it is administered by a trained therapist. Ordinary music listeners, in the presence of live or recorded sound, can go into trance-like states and have intense personal experiences.

I want to turn, now, to a small literature within music studies where personal explorations of meaning have flourished. The gay and lesbian music criticism of the 1990s violated norms of privacy, not only in the public self-identification of queer sexual subjects, but also in the public articulation of personal musical meanings. I have in mind, for instance, Wayne Koestenbaum's work on opera queens (not written by a professional musicologist, but recognized as a distinguished contribution to music criticism). In the last chapter of The Queen's Throat, Koestenbaum describes opera arias, characters, and specific performances in light of his own preoccupations as a gay man. As a faint evocation of this brilliant chapter, I quote a few moments from the description of Tatyana's Letter Scene: "Tatyana sings her melody once, and then a prolonged pause, like guilt ('I shouldn't come out of the closet after all'), arrests her, astonishing the strings, too, into silence, and with renewed force she repeats her theme … Finished! She says the letter is too frightening to reread but I will play this letter scene again and again to remember the excitement of saying 'I'm queer' or 'I'm in love with Eugene Onegin' or 'I've confessed it all.' … Tatyana divulges, divulges, divulges. If only I could sing her signature phrase, that traverses me, and won't release me from its hold …" (299) Note that this example shows Koestenbaum's recontextualization of a dramatic aria, despite Cone's restrictive association of personal context with non-texted instrumental music.
Again, Karen Pegley, in dialogue with Virginia Caputo, recalls her identification, at age seventeen, with the nonstandard continuity of Stravinsky's Symphony in C. (I shall quote from an essay in which Pegley writes of herself in the third person.) Pegley "felt that this work in particular reflected the way in which her life was going to develop as a lesbian: it could be graphed within a rigid box (analogous with her strict environment) and sections 'developed,' but not in the traditional sense (family or children). Finally, and most importantly, she did not sense closure at the end of sections. Instead, she heard juxtaposed areas that functioned as interruptions—a pattern that she thought was inevitable in her life."
To my mind, the most wonderful contribution in this area is Philip Brett's "Piano Four Hands," published in 1997. As his contribution to the debate around Schubert and sexuality, Brett offers the image of two gay men, himself and a younger friend, seated at the piano in the ambiguously sexy posture of a piano duet. They are playing the slow movement of Schubert's Grand Duo. In it, they play and hear, among other things, a nervous tenor given to odd little blurts, and a G-flat who would like to be a star, but who is destined to serve only as a diverting foil to the more normative G-natural. Above all, they hear moments when hidden rage breaks out, threatening to destroy the smooth continuity of the music, and they hear the bland, placating cadences by which the subject of this music always suppresses the rage. As gay men surrounded by homophobia, Brett and his friend know what it is like, this conflict between rage and genteel conformity, and Brett supposes that Schubert did as well, perhaps for related reasons.

These music-critical texts are queer in their openness about same-sex desire; queer, as well, in their non-normative sharing of personal interpretations of classical compositions. Memorably, Brett's essay encapsulates the nature of such writing: "Criticism is radical in musicology because it is personal and has no authority whatsoever." Brett's statement broadens the ambition of his essay. Personal writing is not just a way to find out about gay men's experiences of Schubert; it is essential to music criticism, and shows the risk and importance of criticism in discourse about music.
I do not see that musicology, in general, has followed Brett's lead. For me, the material I have discussed today is important, and raises important questions. When is it appropriate or valuable to articulate, in detail, our personal interpretations of music? What verbal resources do we have for doing so? What would it be like if musicologists routinely wrote about the relations between our lives and our interpretations of music? What if the education of musicologists included creative writing workshops on memoir? What if musicologists consulted regularly with Bonny Method practitioners, as colleagues or as clients? How do we teach students to understand, develop, and value their individual, idiosyncratic relations to music? How do we encourage our students, and ourselves, to use music as a path to self-experience and self-understanding?

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