Tanz und Musik 

Tanz und Musik - Perspektiven für die Historische MusikpraxisThe Monstrosity of Early Music. Revivalism and the Excess of Musical Survivals10.24894/978-3-7965-4973-1 Christelle Cazaux, Agnese Pavanello, Martina PapiroSV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 367 | 25.09.2023 The Monstrosity of Early Music Revivalism and the Excess of Musical Survivals Björn Schmelzer (1) In one of his most famous novels, The Return of the Native (1878), Thomas Hardy has his female protagonist, Eustacia, reflect on the appearance of “mummers” in the village. The mummers (also called guisers) are amateur village players featuring in so-called mummers’ plays: traditional ritualised theatre performances that still take place here and there in villages in England and Ireland. Such plays revolve around a grotesque, comical fight between two characters, one of whom loses, dies, and is then revived by a doctor character. Hardy writes: Of mummers and mumming Eustacia had the greatest contempt. The mummers themselves were not afflicted with any such feeling for their art, though at the same time they were not enthusiastic. A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept at all. 1 As Jacqueline Dillion notes, 2 Hardy borrows the concepts of survival and revival from Edward Tylor’s classic anthropological study Primitive Culture, published seven years earlier, albeit giving them a twist of his own. Rather than sharing his protagonist’s negative attitude towards the mummers’ practice, he is positive about it for the very same reasons that Eustacia considers it worthless. Hardy evokes a strange, almost counter-intuitive, counter-anthropological claim: the players seem unaffected by what they play or act; they are neither enthusiastic nor competent, but it is precisely this disengagement that makes their practice authentic, as opposed to the typical revivalist taste for re-enactment that is accompanied by fervour and excitement. In the latter instance, it is the all-too enthusiastic and self-conscious Thanks to Martin Kirnbauer for giving me the opportunity to write and publish this chapter of an ongoing piece of research, and to Clodagh Kinsella who improved my original English and helped me to translate all French original quotes into readable English. 1 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics 1998, 122. 2 Jacqueline Dillion, Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2016, 17. Björn Schmelzer 368 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 368 | 25.09.2023 identification at play in such affirmative representations that constitutes manifest revivalism’s very fakeness. Eustacia’s final remark (as to why such a boring thing should be saved at all) should be understood rhetorically: nothing in the practice itself seems to legitimate its continuation, yet the actors seem to have an inner conviction that they should somehow stick to what they do, even if they do not know why, as if an aporia precludes any serious answer to her question. For Hardy, a fundamental truth about art practice-- be it high or low art-- seems to be revealed by this paradox. Although nobody in the village really appreciates what is being perpetuated, it is nonetheless a marker of the real thing: Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seemed moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilised survival may be known from a spurious reproduction. 3 Hardy here anticipates a fundamental critique of a common presumption in anthropology, ethnomusicology, and, by extension, (historicist) musicology: namely that the subjects under analysis are acting in coherence and resonance with the symbolic culture in which they are embedded and with which they identify in a positive way, becoming subjects through this very identification. In Hardy’s novel, not only are the local inhabitants who do not play an active part alienated from the traditional practice (which they largely hate or find stupid and outmoded), even its agents, the actors themselves, do not really understand its full meaning and are incapable of fully embodying it. Such a situation implicitly implies the following: that the agents’ full identification would mean that we are dealing with the heyday of a practice or tradition, while their alienation points to a decadence, to a loss of meaning through time and social circumstance. But are things so simple? Does such a presumption not ultimately point to a more problematic ideological horizon? In the mummers’ play the actors stick to the thing, regardless of its intrinsic quality, meaning or interest. Nevertheless, if a specific ‘charm’ is thereby produced, it is precisely due to this attitude, which is lost in the revivalist approach. In this sense actors and recipients (the audience)-share a practice of detachment, displacement and non-identification, or experience successive waves of recognition and estrangement, perceiving these as completely authentic attitudes towards performance practice. For Hardy, art is fundamentally a practice of originary survival. Displacement and estrangement are there from the start, whereas revivalism is always the projection of a false and complete identification with the past-- the idea that one might 3 Hardy, Return (see n. 1), 122. The Monstrosity of Early Music 369 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 369 | 25.09.2023 access this original past without confronting a fundamental gap, or, as Hardy has it, the nightmare of watching a group of traditional pantomime artists or mummers emerging in neat, brand-new garments. What Hardy apparently implies is that the difference between survival and revival is to be situated in almost invisible aspects of attitude: in a sort of meaningless, non-functional, negative surplus (the dirty, old, or ripped garments, the disinterested attitude, etc.); when these aspects are eliminated, as in the case of revival performances, one loses the thing all together. An anecdote-- over two decades old-- concerning my own experience as a wouldbe anthropologist is pertinent here. As a student one learns that one’s observations always come with a bias and that it is important to acknowledge this bias and give it a place in one’s research; indeed, with participatory observation, the relevance of one’s research as an anthropologist is conditional on this bias itself. Less clear is the fact that, rather than being the ones who know-- the identifying agents of the practice under scrutiny-- the subjects of one’s observation are split, separated not only from what they engage in, but also from their own perception of it, and thus suffering a similar alienation as oneself; it is precisely this blind spot of not-knowing or not-identifying that drives them to repeat what they practice. Around 1999, I spent some time in the village of Castelsardo, northern Sardinia, while writing my anthropology thesis on the singing practices of the local brotherhood. The brotherhood’s performance practice mainly consists of orally transmitted four-voice falsobordone, clearly derived from clerical polyphonic practices based on written compositions from the late Renaissance. 4 However, the oral tradition in Castelsardo is totally different from the improvised falsobordone of the Renaissance. Here there is no question of improvisation; instead, singers engage in memory work around a semi-fixed repertoire that only changes because of changing recollections through time (personal initiatives for deliberate change being rare), orally reproduced from generation to generation. It is the very absence of personal creativity which means that these works must be negotiated time and time again, recalled as faithfully as possible. The same goes for the typical style, timbre, and way of producing the four voices. They are not reproduced in a personal way but must mimic a kind of historical ideal that is nonetheless continuously negotiated through trial and error. 5 4 See Ignazio Macchiarella, Il falsobordone fra tradizione orale-e tradizione scritta, Lucca: LIM Editrice 1995; and Bernard Lortat-Jacob, Chants de Passion, au cœur d’une confrérie de Sardaigne, Paris: Cerf 1998. 5 When I was in Castelsardo, members of the brotherhood had already been engaged for some time in recording their rehearsals and official performances, so it was possible to analyse performative changes over the years. Listening to older versions must, of course, have had an influence on their later style. Björn Schmelzer 370 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 370 | 25.09.2023 All this happens in an atmosphere akin to Hardy’s novel. If it were down to the local priest, parish community or villagers, these practices would have been abandoned long ago. They are perceived as outmoded, ugly, and, for the modern liturgy, dysfunctional and unappealing, attracting only aficionados from outside the village-- mostly music scholars and tourists. While I was staying in Castelsardo, something rather remarkable happened, offering a perfect allegory of the contradictions of the brotherhood’s contemporary condition. It must have been the Palm Sunday Mass, initiating the most important week of the year for the brotherhood’s practice. During Mass, however, the confratelli were not allowed to sing, keeping silent behind the altar in the choir stalls. Instead, young village girls were singing Laura Pausini-style Italian schlagers, transformed into ‘contrafacts’ (the original lyrics replaced with semireligious ones) amplified and accompanied by guitar. At the end of the Mass, almost from nowhere, the voices of the brotherhood suddenly rose, singing the so-called Miserere “dietro l’altare” (“from behind the altar”), their invisibility augmenting the ghostly character of the slow, four-voice lament, initiated by a solo voice followed by the others’ sharp, dragging timbres. 6 It is impossible to imagine this almost demonic song sanitised or sung in, let’s say, perfect pitch, by Western conservatory professionals. The repertoire itself, in all its uncanny charm, would immediately be lost. The lack of (classical) aesthetic choice, the stubborn insistence of these unnatural, strident, and for many listeners, monstrous voices, seeming not only to articulate the suffering of the lamenting text, but to be suffering it directly-- suffering and singing as one and the same, a sort of vocal imitatio Christi-- is the condition of the practice; without it, or if it were re-invented as a revival, the whole endeavour would miserably perish. The problem is not so much that these intrinsically negative aspects could not be washed away without losing the practice, but that it would be scarcely possible to re-invent them for a revivalist endeavour, because they would lack what a revival tries to counter, obfuscate, or overcome. The singing practices of the brotherhood of Ceriana, near Genoa, almost vanished in a similar way, not because of the decadence of a worn-out tradition, but through a well-intentioned bid by ex-villagers who, equipped with a professional music education at a classical conservatory, returned home to ‘rescue’ them by reforming their style and vocal practice. 7 What these reforms seemed to miss is that the practitioners’ self-alienation is not the after-effect of an almost extinct art practice, but an essential part of it: it is what 6 A version of this Miserere, based on the CD Castelsardo (Sardegna)-- Confraternite delle voci, Udine: NOTA CD 207 (1998), can be heard here: www.youtube.com/ watch? v=S1PAZFI83WY& list=OLAK5uy_l5Ik0frMFSM4Yid_xxI5pLF1B83sNGyXg&index=1 (last accessed on 17 June 2023). 7 Febo Guizzi, Ilario Meandri, and Guido Raschieri, Polyphonies of Ceriana. Current Research Perspectives, Future Cues, Lucca: LIM Editrice 2013, 27-28. The Monstrosity of Early Music 371 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 371 | 25.09.2023 makes such a practice artistic, and not just a functional or symbolically integrated, identifiable folkloric representation. In this sense, what is called modernity is equally present as a process and experience in what are often called pre-modern traditions. In fact, the authenticity of a traditional practice is guaranteed by the way this practice deals with its proper experience of modernity, albeit expressed as an experience of loss, alienation, or displacement, which cannot, because of its negative nature, be sustained in a revivalist rejuvenation, and must therefore be disavowed. A final anecdote from Castelsardo: at a certain point the confratelli must place the so-called misteri (the symbols of the torture and Crucifixion of Christ) on the altar in a certain order. Remembering or, more accurately, forgetting the correct sequence is part of the ritual. At some point one of the confratelli brings in a French ethnographic study on the brotherhood and opens it at a page with a large photograph of the disposition of the misteri on the altar. 8 In this way, whether intentionally or not, anthropology intervenes in the practice to short-circuit and overcome the “survivalist” dimension of forgetting and negotiation. To be clear: my claim is not that these practices suffer from too much outside influence and have perished because they have lost their authentic core, contaminated by pseudo-universalist Western classical or other music, or by musicology itself. This is the picture commonly upheld by culturalist ethnomusicology, and often repeated by local practitioners themselves. 9 My claim is the opposite: that the only authenticity of these practices, similarly to modern art, lies in artistic alienation, an alienation often overlooked or deliberately omitted by ethnomusicologists, who prefer to hold onto a false image of unalienated authenticity. The actors or practitioners are in the dark about why they are maintaining these practices-- and also about how they are doing so, according to what standards. Neither do they know that these practices do not simply bear witness to an affirmative use of common sense, but rather embody their ongoing negotiation with the material, connecting it less to a revivalist joy than to a painful survival, like the Freudian death drive, which acts beyond the functional, organic, and normative. The nostalgic revivalist view of these practices mostly comes from professional culturalists, such as academic ethnomusicologists, who inject local actors with the belief that what they do is part of the essence of their culture, introducing an identity politics connecting the repertoire and its local practice to an essentialist notion of Sardinian identity, distinct from other places and practices. In Castelsardo, however, the singing practice is not about performing as vividly as 8 The study in case is by Bernard Lortat-Jacob mentioned in n. 4. 9 See, especially, the work of Ignazio Macchiarella, e.g., “Current Creativities in Multipart Singing Practice”, in: TRANS 16 (2012), 1-20; and Cantare a cuncordu. Uno studio a più voci, Udine: Geos 2009. Björn Schmelzer 372 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 372 | 25.09.2023 possible, delivering as fresh a message as one can, but about submitting oneself to almost incomprehensible rules and negotiating with them-- with this negotiation constituting the practice itself. As such, the latter is not a lively illustration of Sardinian culture, but a strange rupture with locality, at the same time linking the singers to Western (music)-history: a perspective rejected by culturalists, for whom a practice cannot exist without at once being absorbed or marginalised by so-called hegemonic culture. Several ethnomusicologists have proposed not to call these practices “polyphony” any longer, but rather “multipart singing”, as the former, by referring implicitly to the classical Western written tradition and practice of counterpoint, supposedly denies their local identity and bind them to a relation of semi-colonial dependence. Yet this proposal refuses such practices the possibility of affirming a dialectical non-relation with the Western elitist cultural horizon. 10 Hardy’s mummers and the Castelsardo singers confront us with an uncanny truth about so-called traditional transmission and “oral traditions”. When these traditions emerge, it is usually in the context of loss that modernity provokes, a loss that presumably didn’t exist in the traditional pre-modern context. Hardy, however, deconstructs these original traditions without loss, calling them revivals. Such traditions would never have existed in this way without going through a phase of modernity (i. e., loss of meaning and context). In this sense, traditional authenticity is the same as the loss, alienation or dislocation experienced in modernity, namely the awareness and recognition of loss of meaning and original context. The tradition without loss and interruption has always been created retroactively because of the trauma of modernity. This retroactive creation is invariably a sort of regression, a conscious turning away from loss that tries to plug the gap with the fantasy of an uninterrupted tradition without ruptures. Survival and revival therefore apply to both so-called pre-modern and modern practices: survival means maintaining and prolonging awareness of the loss of meaning and context; revival means succumbing to the pain of the realisation of loss and regressing into a fantasy of authenticity and identitarian representation. Every self-identifying tradition is thus by definition a product of modernity and of the untenable displacement that it brings. Every claim of uninterruptedness and local identity is a sign that we are dealing with a revival, a regression after modernity into an imagined state of folkloric authenticity. We could define ‘tradition’ as a practice, created retroactively after modernity, that represses the gap that would produce the artwork and thus transforms agents of tradition into artists. By disavowing this ‘modern’ 10 A point made by Macchiarella. See: Ignazio Macchiarella, “Theorizing on Multipart Music Making”, in: Multipart Music: a Specific- Mode of Musical Thinking,- Expressive Behaviour and Sound, ed. Ignazio-Macchiarella, Udine: Nota 2012, 7-22; and “Multipart Music as a Conceptual Tool. A Proposal”, in: Res Musica 8 (2016), 9-25. The Monstrosity of Early Music 373 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 373 | 25.09.2023 artistic experience, art regresses to artisanship or craftmanship, becoming the ally of culturalism and historicism, which deny the universality of the artwork (reducing it to Eurocentric Western particularity, not understanding that what is universal is precisely its singular break with its own historic-cultural conditions). 11 In this way, ethnomusicologists create a false, authentic Other with false non-alienated practices; worse, they have that ‘Other’ believe in the delusion too. A similar non-alienated historical Other is often presumed in Early Music historicism. This Other can never be a modern artist but is rather a skilled artisan producing Gebrauchsmusik (a term made popular by German musicologist Heinrich Besseler, for functional music): non-alienated music accessed directly by its listeners and practitioners without mediation. 12 The traumatic experience of modernity, common to all cultures and societies, is often articulated through the notion of monstrosity: the name for all these symptoms of loss that modernity encounters in the traumatic experience of what emerges as new and without origin; but also in our experience of the monstrous survivals of the past-- obstacles to be repressed or sanitised to access an immaculate past. (2) Survival and revival might, then, be understood as two ways of dealing with the trauma of modernity. My claim is that the emergence of Early Music in the early nineteenth century follows the described above revival logic, and that, regardless of its later metamorphosis-- shaking off universalist claims and becoming scientific and historicist in the century of its birth, expanding access to concrete repertoires and their performance while bridging the gap between musicological research and performance practice in the twentieth century- - this revivalist horizon has remained more or less constant until today. This has to do with the intrinsic logic of the phenomenon that is of interest in rare musical repertoires of the past. Revivalism disavows modernity and imagines a return to the past, ignoring the fact that such a fantasy is only produced after passing through modernity, namely after a profound experience of alienation. It is a fantasy about what has been left behind: a homogeneous society, a harmonious past and its equally harmonious cultural artefacts, not yet alienated from the symbolic horizon from which they emerged. Imagining that one might overcome modern alienation through renewed contact with, research into, and recuperation of what was lost, 11 Todd McGowan, “The Bankruptcy of Historicism: Introducing Disruption into Literary Studies”, in: Everything you Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek, ed. Russell Sbriglia, Durham: Duke University Press 2017, 89-106. 12 Heinrich Besseler, “Appendix: Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening (1925)”, trans. Matthew Pritchard and Irene Auerbach, in: Twentieth Century Music 8/ 1 (2012), 49-70. Björn Schmelzer 374 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 374 | 25.09.2023 revivalism forgets that this phantasmatic production of what was lost is a byproduct of modernity itself. By way of the following examples I hope to clarify how the paradoxical logic of modernity itself, which often historicises alienation, disavows the latter’s ontological status. Pre-modernity is imagined as prelapsarian, resulting in the unforeseen ‘return’ of that what has had to be repressed-- namely the past in its monstrous embodiment- - through monstrous survivals that seem to leak out despite the initially immaculate image of Early Music. In this light, survivals are the undead embodiments of a past returning as the ‘real’ that breaks through the fantasy of the constructed prelapsarian past. 13 At the same time they are the excluded entities that guarantee the fantasy of this immaculate, harmonious past. Early Music is a continuous elimination of monstrous surviving entities that could contaminate its fundamental fantasy, or better, this elimination is condition and integral part of the fantasy itself. 1. Justus Thibaut and the Heidelberger Singverein Versus the Chantres au Lutrin Let us compare two images, representing the singing of old church music in nineteenth-century Germany (Figure 1) and France (Figure 2). The German image is a colour drawing by Jakob Götzenberger, a member of the Nazarene art movement, visual art’s counterpart to the Caecilianist movement in church music and the Palestrina revival in Germany. Created around 1833, it depicts the Heidelberger Singverein’s weekly evening rehearsal at Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut’s house. 14 Thibaut was an enlightened jurist and famous reformer of German law. More crucially for my subject, he was one of the most fervent propagandists for a revival of old church music-- especially that of Palestrina-- in early nineteenth-century Germany, culminating in his anonymously published but very popular 1825 pamphlet On Purity of Music (Über Reinheit der Tonkunst). 15 Thibaut argued against contemporary (church) music, which he considered not only impure and immoral, but also unnatural, submitting to the secular, arrogant and idle trends of modern music, and deprived of the simple, childlike melodies which naturally spring from the people (or so he imagined). The latter are easily associated with great national events, as opposed to the lifeless mathematical 13 The ‘real’ in the Lacanian sense: an impossible, traumatic encounter which cannot be symbolised. 14 James Garratt, Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, 62-69. 15 Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, Über Reinheit der Tonkunst, Heidelberg: Mohr 1825. The Monstrosity of Early Music 375 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 375 | 25.09.2023 Fig. 1: Jakob Götzenberger, Chorprobe bei Anton Friedrich Thibaut, 1833. Kurpfälzisches Museum Heidelberg. Public Domain. Fig. 2: Henri Brispot, Les chantres au lutrin, in: Le journal illustré 41 (October-1876), 325. Björn Schmelzer 376 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 376 | 25.09.2023 exercises embodied by Johann Sebastian Bach. 16 For Thibaut, the last composer of any worth was Handel- - although even he was inferior to all the composers before him-- and afterwards everything went downhill. In his own way, Thibaut lamented, Mozart killed Handel, 17 although thanks to Mozart we still have the Messiah- - albeit, as he bemoaned, in a mortifyingly disfigured version full of Mozart’s “transmogrifications”. 18 While Mozart did acknowledge the value of historical musical works, as Thibaut argued, instead of respecting their original core, he mutilated them by rearranging them to suit contemporary tastes. Thibaut’s ideas were reflected in the repertoires he practiced in his Heidelberg rehearsals. In Figure 1, he is accompanying the Singverein, a ‘modern’ mixed choir (women up front, men in the second row, with groups of two, three, or four singers sharing each music stand)- that gathered weekly but rarely performed in public. Thibaut’s initiative was key in the nineteenth-century Early Music revival, comparable to Carl Friedrich Zelter’s Sing-Akademie in Berlin. 19 Figure 2 is an 1876 engraving after a painting by Henri Brispot, featuring so-called chantres au lutrin and a sitting serpent player, a common accompaniment to liturgical music in France as late as the nineteenth century. In contrast with the Singverein’s homely environment, the service is suggestively situated in a church. While Brispot’s engraving is perhaps mildly ironic at most, many depictions of church singers around a lectern from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century were caricatural, mocking the old practice of liturgical chant in French churches; they were criticised less by specialists of modern music than so-called musicographes and liturgical music reformers who considered this anachronistic remnant of the Ancien Régime an obstacle to a true return to the origins of Christian church music. What interests me here is a comparison, made in 1843, between these two kinds of performance of church music- - German and French- - by Jean-Joseph Bonaventure Laurens in an article for Montpellier’s Revue du Midi. 20 Rather than just repeating Thibaut’s critique of moderns who lack respect for the past and so produce ignorant music, Laurens’ criticism is directed against the monstrous survivals that seem to be the real stumbling block for a potential return to the musical 16 On Thibaut and Mendelssohn’s discussion of Bach’s quality, see: Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2005, 25-26. 17 “Händel hat er hier zu Grabe getragen”. Thibaut, Über Reinheit (see n. 15), 137. 18 The word used in the English translation of Thibaut’s pamphlet. See: Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, On Purity in Musical Art, trans. W. H. Gladstone, London: John Murray 1877, 145. 19 A point made in Garratt, Palestrina (see n. 14); and Applegate, Bach in Berlin (see n. 16). 20 Jean-Joseph Bonaventure Laurens, “De la musique religieuse dans l’ancienne tonalité”, in: Revue du Midi 1 (1843), 295-319. The Monstrosity of Early Music 377 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 377 | 25.09.2023 past. This neatly demonstrates how, all the while claiming a sort of aesthetic and moral universality through his performance practice, Thibaut’s presumed universality can only be attained through the exclusion of what is perceived as monstrous. Laurens, an antiquarian, painter and organist, a friend of the German composer Robert Schumann and of the French musicographe Joseph d’Ortigue, was probably the first in France to promote Thibaut’s approach while dismissing the hopelessly anachronistic state of old church music in France. The latter was symbolised by the chantres au lutrin: Bearing in mind that the elegant society ladies and gentlemen of Heidelberg met regularly to reverently perform Gregorian, Ambrosian, and Russian-Greek church hymns, it is impossible for me not to draw a comparison between this enlightened love of art and the disdain affected in our country for this same music of ancient tonality, which we leave to degrade and wither away in the hands of the parish chanters, who acquit themselves marvellously in the task of rendering these admirable remains unrecognisable. These singers again furnish here a most evident proof that execution is everything in a musical work for those who cannot read it and judge by reading it. Just as the most beautiful verses lose all their charm if they are declaimed without accent, without intelligence, in a word clumsily; just as the portrait of a beautiful person will appear a caricature if the painter copies nature with misinterpretations and incorrectness, the sweetest melody will resemble the cry of a savage or the song of a rude drunkard if it is sung jerkily and with that bellow which seems to be the hallmark of most lectern chanters. Give them some of those tender, dreamy melodies which moved you so deeply when you heard them in the voice of a Rubini, and you will see what will become of them. It is by the bad interpretation, by the complete lack of taste and talent that these songs, born, according to Thibaut’s expression, of the purest inspiration and which are one of the most beautiful transmissions of the ancient Church, have become entirely unrecognisable. 21 There is much of note here, for example how Laurens appreciates the universalist, enlightened quality of Thibaut’s approach, not just because of the repertoire but also because of its interpretation. This interpretation is completely absent in the French practice, which merely produces monstrous sounds. Yet more problematic for Laurens is that the latter deforms or disfigures the repertoire and makes it “unrecognisable”. However, isn’t the real problem that we don’t know what these so-called ‘original’ repertoires and their performances sounded like? Laurens supposes that Thibaut has succeeded in making the repertoires recognisable, but compared to what original? Thibaut’s approach is not yet historicist. Particular repertoires, Western polyphony and also Greek and Russian Orthodox chant interest him mostly because they articulate a sort of Kantian universality; they are good, and so they are just as moral as the people performing them: a logic of classical art, whereby art’s intrinsic morality ought to resonate with society, as Thibaut’s colleague in 21 Ibid., 300. All translations my own unless otherwise stated. Björn Schmelzer 378 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 378 | 25.09.2023 Berlin, Zelter, liked to claim. 22 However, the universality claimed here is one of abstract beauty (as though we all know what it is we are talking about when we talk about beauty). More problematic still is the presumption that, although we have lost the music of the past, we can universally agree on what it sounded like and on how it definitely did not sound like. This dissembling over what the good, moral and beautiful sounds like, is at the same time what produces the monstrous (das Ungeheure), a sort of negative sublime. To make his argument about the importance of recognisability, Laurens cites François-Joseph Fétis, probably the most influential nineteenth-century musicographe: The degradation of Catholic church song, begun a long time ago, has reached its final stage, as much by the faults gradually introduced into its composition, as by the barbarism of its execution. Who could recognise today, in the remnants of this song, disfigured by the faults of copyists, by a thousand capricious traditions, and above all by the ignorance of the singers, their carelessness, the haste of their delivery and their vocal inability, these most noble and religious melodies from the good times of Christendom? 23 For Fétis, not only were the later performers of church music to blame for its decadence or degradation, but they were also behind an accumulation of mistakes in the compositions themselves over previous centuries so that even the scores could not be trusted. However, Fétis was hopeful that reforms to restore ancient ecclesiastical chant were imminent “if the routine, habits and pride of the singers did not present a powerful obstacle to the improvements which have nevertheless become essential”. 24 The reconstruction and revival of the old church traditions in the way people such as Fétis and Félix Danjou perceived it had to be (paradoxically or not? ) accompanied by the destruction of the aberrant, of remainders, which stood out through their deformation and ugliness, but also their anachronism, and most of all their obvious lack of recognisability. One can imagine how Thibaut constructed his naïve universality: he must have believed that a moral aesthetics simply radiated from the old scores, at least compared to the modern Romantic ones, which were full of disruption and dissonance, proof of an alienation and decadence. Fétis and Danjou, yet more historicist, did not believe the authentic version was to be found in the aberrant manuscripts or in what they reproduced, so how could they condemn the chanters without knowing what they were looking for? How is their approach not built on a phantasmatic repertoire and sound, universalised through the exclusion of an anachronistic, monstrous survival- - monstrous because it 22 Garratt, Palestrina (see n. 14), 62-68. 23 Laurens, “De la musique” (see n. 20), 301. 24 Ibid. The Monstrosity of Early Music 379 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 379 | 25.09.2023 deviated from the ideal they seem to have conceived for themselves? Or is the structure of this fantasy still more complex, in the sense that it is precisely the assumed monstrosity of the chanters that sustains the fantasy of an uncorrupted music of the past? With Laurens’ position in mind, it might be interesting to investigate the two images more closely, for they represent certain visual distinctions between what he considers normative and what he finds monstrous. Take the constellation of the ensembles: in the German drawing, we see a mixed, youthful constellation of male and female singers (apart from the older master Thibaut sitting at the harpsichord). This kind of mixed vocal ensemble was a novelty in the early nineteenth century and church music reformers like Thibaut and Zelter were proud to see in this heteronormative gathering of mostly married men and women another sign of the moral superiority of their Bildung project and an important political contribution to the stability of the state in the period of post-revolutionary Restoration. In fact, the initiative had only very limited emancipatory potential, especially for women, as Celia Applegate has shown. 25 In her view, the late eighteenth century was much more favourable for female professional musicians than the early nineteenth, when it became almost impossible for women to have a professional musical career, and when they were forced to give up the little leisure time they had, now under the controlling gaze of their husbands. As usual, the diminishing of the patriarchal eye led to the immanent proliferation of invisible eyes that were everywhere, so to speak. Above the heads of the Singverein performers, Götzenberger depicts the portrait of a Baroque composer (signalled by his period wig) who, in the context of Thibaut’s initiative, can be none other than his second hero (after Palestrina)-who features multiple times in Purity in Music: Georg Friedrich Handel. The portrait functions as a master signifier, bestowing legitimation and meaning, with universal aspirations, upon the moral-aesthetic endeavour of the choir. By contrast, the French engraving shows, positioned around a lectern, old men whose age and ugly physiognomies no doubt articulate the disfigurement, repulsiveness, and decay of their performance. Against the mixed choir’s new morality and normativity, nineteenth-century depictions of same-sex male chanters at a lectern stand in a tradition of homosexual and pederastic suspicion, stressing the performers’ monstrous, counter-natural engagement. 26 This iconography dates back to the Middle Ages and was revived in France in 1734 by 25 Applegate, Bach in Berlin (see n. 16), 135-138. 26 For the medieval origins of this tradition, see: Bruce W.- Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001. Chapter 4, “Polyphones and Sodomites: Music and Sexual Dissidence from Leoninus to Chaucer’s Pardoner” (137-190) is especially relevant. Björn Schmelzer 380 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 380 | 25.09.2023 Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset and his satirical narrative poem Le Lutrin vivant. 27 The latter gained popularity in the nineteenth century, especially as anticlerical satire, through its provocative illustrations of the poem’s last scene, featuring a ‘living lectern’. Here an unfortunate chorister, his trousers patched with a sheet of parchment from a choirbook, is tied to the lectern by the chanters so they can sing from the missing page. This comical but cruel scene, leaving nothing to the imagination, was depicted several times in the nineteenth century, alluding to the chanters’ perverted sexuality. In a pastel drawing by Jean-François Millet (see Figure 3), the perversion is emphasised by the postures of the three chanters: one (seemingly to read the score better) is touching the boy, who is desperately holding onto the eagle lectern; another’s scopic drive is hilariously amplified; while the third is playing a serpent easily confused with a living animal. 28 The Brispot engraving contains an element structurally comparable to the Handel portrait at the Singverein. Akin to the German drawing, above the singers’ heads, we see two creatures reminiscent of animals from a Gothic bestiary, or gargoyles, the monstrous creatures on the exterior of Gothic churches, which gained popularity in the nineteenth century thanks to Viollet-le-Duc’s imaginative restorations. 29 But what kind of signifier are these animals or monsters? Is their emblematic function not of a completely different stature than that of the Handel portrait? Handel functions as an authority figure, granting legitimation to the German performance practice; the portrait has the authoritative function of a master signifier. By contrast the animals seem rather to fall out of the system of signification, lacking any authority and rather representing a stand-in for a missing signifier. 30 Perhaps, fitting their ambiguous nature, we could call them the chanters’ symptom? The animals are the presence of an absence of meaning, impossible to confuse with a master signifier. By depicting these animals, derived from a Gothic tradition playing with the ambiguities of monstrosity, Brispot manages to neatly articulate something of the equally ambiguous position of French chanters in the 27 Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset, Ver-Vert ou les voyages du perroquet de nevers. Le caresme impromptu. Et le lutrin vivant, Amsterdam: publisher unknown 1735. 28 The drawing is in an unknown private collection after being sold at auction in 2006. See: www.artnet.fr/ artistes/ jean-fran%C3 %A7ois-millet/ le-lutrin-vivant-the-living-lectern-DQm CNQTED-5-VDVxGLs6Bw2 (last accessed on 17 June 2023). Despite our best efforts, we haven’t been able to locate the owner to ask for permission. Nevertheless, we take the liberty of reproducing this work of art, which is otherwise impossible to find in art books and catalogues. 29 Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2009. 30 The concepts of master and missing signifier (the signifier absent in the chain of signification but nevertheless essential to it) here are indebted to McGowan’s elaboration of them. See: Todd McGowan, “The Absent Universal: from the Master Signifier to the Missing Signifier”, in: Problemi International 2.2 (2018), 195-214. The Monstrosity of Early Music 381 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 381 | 25.09.2023 nineteenth century, their exclusion from the master signifier of the musicographes, aligning them with a shadow side, a missing signifier, and opening up towards a concrete, radical universality (instead of a master signifier that always exists on behalf of a missing signifier). It is this identification with the position of exclusion and non-belonging that gives the chanters’ practice its unexpected emancipatory dimension, revealing the pseudo-emancipation and fake universality of Thibaut’s project. Although operating within the official institution of the Church, my claim is that singers / chanters, performing diverse types of plainchant and polyphony, precisely because of their ambiguous vocal and musical investment, have been problematised, often ridiculed, and even partly excluded by church fathers, theologians and liturgical reformers at least since the emergence of written polyphony in the twelfth century, while at the same time functioning as the missing signifier on behalf of which the Church could play out its ambiguous relation to enjoyment. 31 To illustrate my claim, it suffices to recall the legendary accusations against singers in the 31 For a recent study on the ambiguity of the voice, relevant to my context, see: Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006. Fig. 3 : Jean-François Millet. Le lutrin vivant, ca. 1840-1843. Location unknown. Björn Schmelzer 382 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 382 | 25.09.2023 theological writings of John of Salisbury and Aelred of Rievaulx, high clerics of the institutional church; these texts are written in such a way that it is impossible to disconnect the (sexual) enjoyment of the rhetorical description from the condemnation itself: or better, it is as if the illicit practice is a construction of writing itself, produced by the (impossible) desire of church men. 32 Both writers mix extremely rhetorical language describing polyphonic singing that is full of implicit and explicit sexual imagery with metaphors of monstrosity, animality and the aberrant, seeming not to distinguish between lust and condemnation, indeed actually producing desire through condemnation. 33 2. Monstrous Obstacles to Keep the Fantasy Alive in Nineteenth-Century France In Germany, the Early Music project was one of Bildung and (abstract) universality, with the practical intention to replace the vulgar modern music of Protestant or Catholic liturgy. 34 The political and cultural post-Revolution situation was considered alienating, with the new Romantic music of contemporary composers such as Beethoven symptomatic of its monstrosity. For Thibaut, the alternative was an historist return to Palestrina, regaining the lost harmony that would eventually radiate out into a pure, natural, and enlightened society. 35 In France, Early Music was also part of the Restoration movement after the 1789 Revolution and continued to be a strong conservative instrument during several other revolutionary attempts in the nineteenth century; its primary function was Catholic liturgical and musical reform. However, the obstacle that blocked-- and in so doing also maintained the fantasy of an authentic past-- was 32 Quotations from these texts can be found in: Timothy McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises, New York: Clarendon Press 1998. 33 Apt here is the work of Alain de Lille, for whom the aberrant practice of polyphony is inextricable from a rupture in language and nature. In De incarnatione rhytmica, he suggests the Incarnation is God’s deception of his own creation. In De planctu naturae, nature and its creatures emerge as fractured and counter-natural. See: Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire (see n. 26); William E.-Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050-1230, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004; and David Rollo, Kiss My Relics: Hermaphroditic Fictions of the Middle Ages, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2011. 34 Garratt, Palestrina (see n. 14), 62-213. 35 Although often confused, historism and historicism are not the same and should be interpreted as two related but distinct historical approaches. Historism proclaims a return to the past, backed up by a naive universal horizon; while historicism is critical towards any universal claims, being founded on the “presupposition that historical context is determinative”. McGowan, “The Bankruptcy” (see n. 11), 90. The Monstrosity of Early Music 383 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 383 | 25.09.2023 not, as in Germany, alienating contemporary music, but the confrontation with a sort of fossilised remainder of the old practices: the chantres au lutrin. Not only did they not seem to fit in, but they also triggered an incredible, almost aggressive urge for the restoration of chant which, combined with historicist research, might domesticate or eventually destroy it. Another consequence was that French musicographes felt the need to bypass all-too idealistic historist claims and to engage with what they thought would be more serious historicist approaches based on specific historical research. Undoubtedly this paved the way for the rigorously historicist approach to Early Music that came later, but it also gave rise to the problem of universality that was to emerge again and again in the future: if there are only historical particulars to be recognised and studied, defined by a particular historical context and horizon, how can one ever manage to perform this music (bound as it is to specific historical conditions, impossible to transpose to any new performance without losing its historical value or authenticity)? 36 It should be noted that the particularisation of the historical and cultural didn’t mean that the old (abstract) universalist perspective was abandoned. On the contrary, instead of the naïve Romantic historist approach, which tried to satisfy the fantasy of a golden, prelapsarian time (influenced by Rousseau and Herder), and often romanticising the savage historical or cultural Other, particularist historicist studies-- in the realm of (Western abstract) universality-- often culminated in supremacist, racist and Eurocentric taxonomies. 37 Apparently the only way out of this problem was not to revise the concept of abstract universality, but to abandon, or better deny, universality altogether. While research into historical particularities would enable more and more specific knowledge of the musical repertoires of the past (their context and performance practice), paradoxically it would make access to these repertoires via contemporary performance more and more impossible, without seeking recourse to a sort of naïve but nevertheless disavowed (and equally false)- universality, that was simply the transhistorical implementation of what is particularly historical. One might ask why Laurens abruptly invokes the French chanters’ monstrosity without taking time to articulate in concrete terms exactly wherein the superiority of the German singers lies. Or, to put it differently: although probably reasonably happy with the work of Thibaut and his Singverein, Laurens is nevertheless incapable of praising them in their own right and can do so only at the expense of French chanters and their monstrosity- - something about these chanters prompts his 36 Ibid., 101-103. 37 A paradigmatic example would be the work of François-Joseph Fétis; for a critical approach towards his racism, see: Thomas Christensen, Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2019. Björn Schmelzer 384 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 384 | 25.09.2023 fantasy to instrumentalise them as the thing blocking his direct access to music of the past. Laurens must have been unconsciously aware that Thibaut and his group could never realise his own (historical) fantasy, a failure for which the French chanters, triggering the anxiety of the real thing, were now blamed. The problem was not their impotence and incapacity, but on the contrary their over-presence and weird magnetism, like an excess of the past: this monstrous point of subjectivity entangled Laurens in his (phantasmatic)-search. Only via an impossible comparison with this monstrosity was Laurens capable of redeeming something of the boring quality of Thibaut’s all-too perfect, moderate revivals. Monstrosity is thus the name for the encounter with the radically unknown in the historic or geographic Other, the Thing that terrifies but at the same time founds (historical) fantasies and anxieties. I would like to claim that this appellation of monstrosity in France was not in fact directly to do with the actual singing, but rather with the anxiety of being confronted with a living remainder of the past that absolutely could not fit in. Monstrosity was subsequently reserved not only for the chanters but for every encounter where a gap in signification was detected during the musicographes’ musico-historical research. It would not be difficult to map these traumatic encounters and attach them to different objects of anxiety. 38 Although the myth of a pure and immaculate Early Music, dreamt of by Thibaut, was gradually left behind, perceived as naïve and lacking scientific profundity, other master signifiers would emerge. Musicographe Félix Clément makes a fascinating observation about incessant historical change, deviation, and monstrosity-- the fact that, as much as we would love to restore the past, it is impossible because of its unavoidably barbarous articulations, which official institutions have tried to regulate without much success. 39 Consequently he asks what is left of value for the present- - namely where one 38 This map could show the different master signifiers the musicographes were holding onto: Palestrina, for example, or plainchant. The work of Katharine Ellis offers a guideline, itself mapping three groups of Early Music aficionados in France: the plainchantists (a somewhat heterogeneous group including Danjou and Clément), who refused Palestrina as a solution; the Palestrinians (Choron, De la Fage); and finally the various promoters of tonality (including Fétis). See Katherine Ellis, “Palestrina et la musique dite ‘palestrinienne’ en France au XIXe siècle: questions d’exécution et de reception”, in: La Renaissance et sa musique au XIXe siècle, ed. Philippe Vendrix, Paris: Klincksieck 2000, 151-184: 169; and Katharine Ellis, Interpreting- the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005. 39 For an indispensable (recent) study on Clément- - especially the controversy around his transcriptions of thirteenth-century plainchant repertoire which were performed live several times, including in the presence of Louis Bonaparte-- see: Amélie Porret-Dubreuil, Contribution à l’ étude de la restauration de la musique à l’ église au XIXe siècle au prisme de l’expérience de Félix Clément (1822-1885), PhD dissertation, Université de Lyon, 2016. The Monstrosity of Early Music 385 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 385 | 25.09.2023 might regain those stable historical elements that could count as universal. As a counterexample, he mentions Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame. At best, says Clément, this work has archaeological value: its “incorrect harmony” greatly displeased nineteenth-century ears, in the same way as a Cherubini mass would conceivably have been unpleasant to fourteenth-century ears-- a statement almost akin to that of a historical or cultural relativist. 40 Nevertheless, Clément claims, there is a universal truth to grasp in the same historical context: not the performance of this whimsical polyphonic Mass during the royal coronation, but the singing, on the same occasion, of the simple hymn Veni creator Spiritus- - equally valuable in 1364 and in 1825. Clément thus asks: should we not stop attributing exclusive importance to changeable forms in art, and instead focus on works “whose simplicity runs against the wheel of time and which seem to be imperishable? ” 41 For Belgian musicographe and polymath Fétis, nothing before the fifteenth century really merited listening. As Thomas Christensen has recently shown, Fétis developed one of the most intriguing and simultaneously terrifying examples of Early Music research (tackling not only historical sources but also musical, anthropological and even pseudo-scientific race studies). 42 Fétis was fighting monsters everywhere he could, but he had a more serious problem: he was so addicted to his phantasmatic master signifiers, glued to a sort of fake universal horizon in which the Western concept of tonality played, in his view, a supreme role- - a vision elaborated from aberrant readings of Kant and Hegel, injected with envy of his colleagues, and ethnographic musical studies proving to him the inferiority of non-Western music, as well as later nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific studies on phrenology and race-- that his legacy is as problematic as it is symptomatic. The list of monstrosities described by nineteenth-century French musicographes, related to ancient sources of plainchant or polyphony, or describing the 40 François-Louis Perne, who was planning the first edition of the Mass, wrote as early as 1810, in a bluntly historically teleological manner: “There is no denying that the harmony of this Mass offers no charm to a practiced ear. Its effect is hard and savage; at every turn the sound is betrayed by false relations, by parallel fifths and octaves and by passing tones that proceed by skips. The foundation of this harmony is composed of nothing but fourths, fifths, and octaves. Rarely a third or a sixth appears to soften the harshness-- if I dare to call it thus-- that results from such a bizarre assemblage. Let us add that the rhythm of this composition is worth no more than the harmony. Thus must moderns judge such monstrosities”. (Quot. and trans. in Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut. A Guide to Research, London and New York: Routledge 2012, 278.) Perne is nevertheless convinced that we should respect the achievement from a historical perspective. 41 Félix Clément,- Histoire de la musique depuis les temps anciens jusqu’ à nos jours, Paris: Hachette & Cie 1885, 682. 42 Christensen, Stories of tonality (see n. 37). Björn Schmelzer 386 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 386 | 25.09.2023 contemporaneous practice of chanters, is endless. To give but a few examples: Theodore Nisard calls the organisation of plainchant from the thirteenth century onwards “monstrous”- - unchanged for more than 350 years. On the plainchant “cantus firmus” performed by low voices, for instance, the others perform “words which were often revoltingly obscene”. 43 When talking of Machaut, he complains that “bad taste defies the Church’s anathemas”. 44 On many occasions Fétis calls the hexachord system monstrous, while for Danjou the alterations in plainchant are monstrous, an opinion adopted by Fétis and Ortigue. 45 For Ortigue, the mixture of plainchant modality and modern modality is a “bastard and monstrosity of heteroclite psalmody”. 46 Stephen Morelot, writing in Danjou’s Revue de la musique religieuse, dubs the melodic assemblage of plainchant monstrous, provoking disgust and boredom in the listener. 47 Equally monstrous are the editions of plainchant used in several French churches. Fétis condemns as monstrous certain harmonic adaptations of plainchant, for example one by Félix Clément, which the latter defended as a way of making these repertoires available to a wider public. In an 1844 letter to Fétis, Danjou nevertheless seems convinced that the plica-ornament or trill should be performed historically as chevrotant, a dehumanising term comparing vocal performance to the bleating of goats. 48 Fétis himself refutes this by recalling the beautiful rendition of the trillo by Italian singers, writing: “it may have been so in the churches of France, where the execution of liturgical chant has always been very imperfect; but in Italy and especially in Rome the singers’ trill was excellent, as we have said previously, and the use of ornaments 43 Théodore Nisard, Du plain-chant parisien: examen critique des moyens les plus propres d’améliorer et de populariser ce chant, Paris and Lyon: Librarie Catholique de Perisse frères 1846,-20. 44 Ibid. 45 François-Joseph Fétis, Histoire générale de la musique depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu’ à nos jours, volume 4, Paris: Firmin Didot frères, fils et Cie 1874, 545. 46 Quoted in Christensen, Stories of Tonality (see n. 37), 54. 47 Stéphen Morelot, “À. M. le directeur de la revue de la musique religieuse”, in: Revue de la musique religieuse, populaire et classique 1 (1845), 232-235: 234. 48 Danjou probably knew Franchino Gaffurio’s claim: “Italorum nonnullos ut Genuenses et qui ad eorum littora resident, caprizare ferunt”, but several writers use the same verb to describe the vocal timbre of chanters, including de Goncourt’s Manette Salomon (Paris: Charpentier 1902 [1867], 26), picturing “le Dominus vobiscum chevrotant du vieux prêtre […] les nazillements des chantres”. In La chanson du cidre (Geneva: Arbre d’Or 2004 [1900], 36), Frédéric Le Guyader describes “deux chantres chevrotant s’asseyaient au lutrin”, which is refuted by Abbé Petit in Danjou’s Revue (vol. 4, 1848, 124): “la vox tremula n’a rien de commun avec cet effet ridicule, horrible, qu’on nomme chevrotement”. Petit claims that such an effect is not natural at all-- an exaggerated denial that can only make the reader conclude that the matter must be pertinent in the writer’s eyes. The Monstrosity of Early Music 387 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 387 | 25.09.2023 in song was incessant”. 49 Fétis is of course referring to the singing practice of the Sistine Chapel, but his absolute assurance as to its quality was based purely on written sources such as the writings of Giuseppe Baini, because Fétis had never heard the choir. Danjou, however, had and was one of the first to debunk the survival myth in detail-- not only its vocal quality but even more the authenticity of its vocal practices, which, as even Fétis believed, dated from times immemorial. One might imagine that, by deconstructing the historical and mystical fantasy of the Sistine Chapel choir, one could banish the fantasy of Early Music altogether. On the contrary: its deconstruction actually helped to maintain it. In a letter to his teacher Zelter, Mendelssohn, too, expressed his mixed feelings about the choir’s quality after hearing it live for the first time. 50 It’s somehow ironic that this (survivalist) encounter happened just after Mendelssohn’s own acclaimed historist (revivalist) rendition of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, the latter having somehow fallen into oblivion in the second half of the eighteenth century. 51 As long as one did not hear the Sistine Chapel choir, then, the myth remained intact, but when experienced in vivo, especially by musicians and music specialists, 52 it often shattered at once. Danjou himself wrote extensively about his experience of the choir. 53 Confronted with empirical experience, the sonorous past embodied by the choir quickly vanished-- not to be found anywhere, neither in the Vatican, in written sources and used manuscripts, which Danjou claimed were all of quite recent date, nor in the survivals of, for example, traditional music, which he also deconstructed as fake or of recent date. Just as in France, monstrosity was omnipresent. According to Danjou, even the much-acclaimed ornamentations in, for example, Gregorio Allegri’s legendary Miserere, and in other falsobordoni, were not ancient at all but rather an eighteenth-century sham. 54 Jules Bonhomme repeats Danjou’s view in the following terms: 55 49 François-Joseph Fétis, Histoire générale de la musique depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu’ à nos jours, volume 5, Paris: Firmin Didot frères, fils et Cie 1876, 224. 50 Richard Boursy, “The Mystique of the Sistine Chapel Choir in the Romantic Era”,-in: The Journal of Musicology 11/ 3 (1993), 307-311. 51 Applegate, Bach in Berlin (see n. 16), 173-233. 52 Graham O’Reilly (“Allegri’s Miserere” in the Sistine Chapel, Suffolk: The Boydell Press 2020, 113-115) discusses the disgust Otto Nicolai and Ludwig Spohr felt on hearing the choir’s parallel fifths and octaves, and ornamentation. 53 Félix Danjou, “Lettres d’Italie”, in: Revue de la musique religieuse, populaire et classique 3 (1847), 129-141. 54 Ibid., 136. 55 Jules Bonhomme, Principes d’une véritable restauration du chant grégorien: et examen de quelques éditions modernes de plain-chant, Paris: Jacques Lecoffre et Cie 1857, 262. Björn Schmelzer 388 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 388 | 25.09.2023 The beginning of all the pieces is left to a soprano, who attacks the first notes vigorously, surrounds them with appoggiaturas, and prolongs a trill on the last syllable. So the voices share a duet. The soprano and tenor sing the melody as it is in the book; the alto and the bass make the third at the octave. The strangest harmonic effects sometimes result from this combination. When they arrive at the finale, the chanters repeat the last word or the last two words in triad major. This is practiced for all the songs of the Mass and the antiphons of Vespers. This plainsong, which some believe dates back to remote antiquity, is quite modern. The large folio manuscripts which are placed on the lectern do not indicate a date earlier than the seventeenth century. The text is often shorter than that of the edition of Paul V. The exaggerated ornaments that the cantors distribute on this text seem to move away from the old gravity. The continual jerks of the voices and the evenness of the notes indicate the eighteenth century. Plainsong is therefore in a state of inferiority, in Rome, relative to music. If the old traditions had been preserved, it would not be so. Hearing the voices of the Romans, one regrets that they no longer possess those original vocalisations that their ancestors proposed as a challenge to the rough throats of the chanters of Charlemagne: no other nation could perform them with more delicacy. Danjou also mentions the unpleasant and painful sound of the falsetto singers he has heard in the Vatican in lieu of castrato singers, who were becoming scarce: Everywhere we turn, we find these unfortunate natural sopranos who are so painful to watch […] as castrati are becoming increasingly rare, we are reduced to using these artificial, strangled, wild voices that may well be effective in the mountains of the Tyrol, heard at great distance, but who in a church burst your eardrums and are an insult to good taste. 56 In the same year, in his own journal, he writes: “They are tall bearded boys who have applied themselves to forming an artificial feminine voice and who, while singing, make terrible grimaces, shake their heads and make efforts that are very painful to see”. 57 Danjou is silent on his appreciation for the castrato voices but other visitors expressed similar bewilderment or disgust after the uncanny experience of hearing them in person, or after hearing Alessandro Moreschi, the so-called “last castrato” of the Vatican, on a wax cylinder recording. Monstrous fascination changes to real interest when, rather than approaching Moreschi as an object of one’s own historical fantasy, one is able to transform his so-called vocal monstrosity (resulting from a monstrous physical mutilation) into a subjectivity- - as if castration 56 Félix Danjou, “Lettres d’Italie”, in: Revue et gazette musicale de Paris 14/ 24 (13 June 1847),-196. 57 Danjou, “Lettres d’Italie” (see n. 53), 138. The Monstrosity of Early Music 389 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 389 | 25.09.2023 were the condition for the emergence of an uncastrated sublime vocality. 58 Here, historicist deconstruction is a way to cope with the impossibility, yet reality, of an encounter with the monstrous remainder of the past; in other words, it is a way to undo the (split) subjectivity resulting from this monstrous encounter which would otherwise be too traumatic as it would shatter the signifiers of knowledge one is holding onto, leaving one with the past as a void. Avoiding this real encounter at all costs must have been what some scholars unconsciously intended when they catapulted the historical Thing as far as possible into the darkness of the distant past. This strategy went hand in hand with the tracing of a progressive decadence from a zero point of authentic originality, a point which did not exist and had to be set in parentheses as it was not to be found in any written source-- up until the contemporary situation, when scholars imagine a reform and return to the original: something seen as a realistic goal within the revivalist perspective. In his Études de science musicale, tome II (1898), Jesuit musicographe Antoine Dechevrens constructs an intriguing genealogy of this decadence, making it difficult to capture the original, inaugurating moment of Christian ecclesiastical chant, a more or less stable point of reference for any potential chant reform and revival. Dechevrens distinguishes four periods, beginning with the blessed original, which consists of a primitive, progressive, and finally perfect stage. According to Dechevrens, this perfect stage must have ended sometime around the tenth century. Yet, given that the oldest sources available to us are all from after the original period, namely from a period of decline, one is forced to conclude that this first period is nothing but an imaginary perfect origin. Dechevrens’ second period, spanning the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, is meanwhile “a more or less rapid, more or less complete period of decadence”; 59 the third, from the 58 Moreschi’s voice, as a phantasmatic piece of the real of the past, confronts the limit of historically informed performance, as no Early Music performer is, for example, trying to imitate his style and vocal technique. In a recent online episode of “Early Music Sources” (www.youtube. com/ watch? v=iP2vw6JIdNQ [last accessed on 17 June 2023]) about the castrato singer, the imagined physical horror of the castrating practice is confused with the anxiety of hearing Moreschi’s (symbolically uncastrated)-voice timbre and technique-- an impossible, subjective voice from the past. Since he was a victim of a mutilating practice, he cannot be accepted as subject or artist: what is heard in his uncanny performance is nothing other than the pain of the dehumanizing, denaturalizing act of castration, turning Moreschi into a monster born of his historical environment. But this presupposes a natural, universal position for man and his reproductive function. The contradiction of the historicist position is revealed here: the voice of the castrato is not a lack or absence, but a “too much” that causes anxiety. The universal normativity at play, fitting with a conservative view of the past that only sees it as worthy of being saved when it offers master signifiers, is exactly what Moreschi’s recordings as a castrato and an artist put into question. 59 Antoine Dechevrens, Études de science musicale, tome II, Paris: chez l’auteur 1898, 223. Björn Schmelzer 390 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 390 | 25.09.2023 fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, “a period of ruin and death, during which scarcely anything remained from Gregorian chant but a body without life or soul, rhythm having almost wholly disappeared”; 60 and the last, starting in the late seventeenth century, that of restoration. It is strange that, after this disastrous historical round-up, Dechevrens fails to surmise that there is little to be restored as the decline had in fact set in from the start, as if there was never a golden age, and the origin of ecclesiastical chant was at the same time its downfall. However, he never takes the historico-conceptual consequences of this seriously. Rather, his perspective appears to be a strategy to safeguard an original period of stability-- albeit unattainable-- anticipating a nine-hundred-year decline. Dechevrens’ hypothetical reconstruction reprises prior claims by Nisard and Ortigue. In an intriguing 1836 article on Gregorian chant for the magazine L’univers religieux, Ortigue aims to correct Abbé Jean Lebeuf, who, in his Traité historique et pratique sur le chant ecclesiastique (1741), detected only two or three Gallican deviations from the Roman institutional tradition since the French / Gallican church had adopted it in the ninth century. Ortigue himself enumerates continuous examples of deviation that thwart the unity of liturgical chant, from the ninth until the eighteenth centuries. Lebeuf’s own most intriguing example, based on both his reading of historical sources and personal experience, is the eighteenth-century (extant) tradition of singing the responsories of matins at Notre-Dame, Paris, in an ornamented way called machicotage. 61 Yet what is it precisely that makes this practice aberrant for Lebeuf and later commentators? Is it its anachronism, or the fact that it deviates from the Roman institutional norm? Perhaps a mixture of both? We could imagine the following ur-fantasy of historical monstrosity: a demonic pact must lie behind such an aberrant practice without proper place or lineage, a pure haunting deviation that, owing to its deviant character, was unable to die a proper historical death and be organically absorbed by future traditions, so is now monstrously standing out and living on like an undead creature; by a devilish twist of fate (or intrinsic necessity? ), today it is these very monstrosities, rather than any moderate, normative practices, which are capable of reaching us as survivals. This encounter cannot therefore be anything but unpleasant, especially (as Lebeuf claims) for visitors to Paris, unused to hearing such things. It seems that, once again, the flipside is also implied-- namely that the uncorrupted original, lost as it is, could only be pleasant and profoundly fulfilling. Ortigue can do no other than agree with Lebeuf, asking 60 Ibid. 61 A term deriving from the chanter-performer named machicot. It has been associated with pejorative notions. In his Dictionnaire- Argot-Français & Français-Argot, Delesalle defines it as “Mauvais chantre d’église; incapable, imbécile” (Paris: Paul Ollendorff 1986, 169); in Jules Corblet’s Glossaire étymologique et comparatif du patois picard, ancien et moderne (Paris: Dumoulin 1851, 471) it is “machicot: maladroit” . The Monstrosity of Early Music 391 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 391 | 25.09.2023 why one should even preserve such a chant practice, no matter how old and consecrated, if it is “freaky” and has the “misfortune of displeasing”, as he puts it. 62 There is at least one other interpretation of the sound of this machicotage offered by Danjou, who connects it to practices in two further Parisian churches: 63 “One continues to sing in some churches of Paris ‘chants sur le livre’ or machicotage. At Saint-Sulpice, at Saint-Séverin, on Christmas Day, the faithful were deafened by this barbaric music which had long since been banned from the cathedral of Paris”. 64 We do not get to learn anything about what precisely has gone on, because Danjou’s only concern seems to be his pity for the ears of the worshippers, confronted with the horrendous too-muchness of a piece of the impossible past. 3. The Monstrous in France via Hugo and Back to Germany with Hoffmann The most (in)famous monster in French literature, of the same calibre as the one invented by Mary Shelley a dozen years earlier, bears a weird name: Quasimodo. It is hardly a proper name, rather a sort of pet name, marking the place and time of his discovery by the citizens of Paris. Frankenstein’s monster has no name at all, although he has a sort of father, while Quasimodo appears ex nihilo, a disfigured foundling dropped on the steps of Notre-Dame. 65 Beyond his later profession as the cathedral’s bellman, it is this (non-)name or quasi-name that connects him to his fellow monsters, the chantres au lutrin, a genius stroke of Victor Hugo’s that points at the void of a missing signifier. “Quasi modo”, after all, reprises the first two words of the entrance song (introitus) sung by the chanters at Mass on Easter Sunday, the day on which the foundling appears. The name has largely been explained as a pun comprising a conjunction that seemingly inaugurates a simile, the “as if” or “almost like” articulating his dehumanised nature; perhaps even more important is that it is just a conjunction stripped of its promised simile, the very articulation of the missing signifier. It is easy to reconstruct what Quasimodo has been stripped of, for the introitus, with its biblical text, exposes it: almost like 62 Joseph d’Ortigue, “Du chant grégorien”, in: L’univers religieux (21 January 1836), 1-3. 63 Félix Danjou, “Nouvelles diverses”, in: Revue de la musique religieuse, populaire et classique 1 (1845), 515. 64 Chant sur le livre is normally not a monodic ornamented plainchant, but a polyphonic practice of one or more improvised lines on a slowly performed chant melody in the bass. 65 Survival in this paper thus means what exists beyond itself, beyond a proper lineage or organic, procreative sense or future which could be connected to revival. See: Lee Edelman, “Against Survival: Queerness in a Time that’s out of Joint”,-in: -Shakespeare Quarterly-62/ 2 (June 2011), 148-169. Björn Schmelzer 392 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 392 | 25.09.2023 a newborn, he has a guileless lust for milk 66 - - which is to say that he is without lineage or love. At the same time this creature is attached to Notre-Dame Cathedral itself and might be considered the Gothic edifice’s symptom. He emerges just after the chapter in which Hugo invites the reader to climb the cathedral’s tower for an incredible view of Paris, conceiving of it as a sort of medieval panopticon from which to describe all the buildings and neighbourhoods of Paris. Let us not forget that this was also one of Freud’s hiding places when studying with Charcot: “my favourite resort in Paris; every free afternoon, I used to clamber about there on the towers of the church between the monsters and the devils” 67 -- monsters and devils which, as Michael Camille writes, were not there in Hugo’s day but later installed during restoration works by Viollet-le-Duc, who had read the author’s novel. As Suzanne Nash has demonstrated, the way Hugo subjectifies the cathedral is intriguing, making apparent his inner conflict in a manner key to our investigation: on the one hand he laments the demolition and loss of the past, of Gothic architecture; and on the other he sees in this loss a radical possibility for the present and future. 68 It is as if, starting from the common idea of the cathedral as a glorious national monument and symbol of the lost past, through the writing process itself Hugo slowly arrives at the insight that the cathedral is not at all this monument, that it was never a pure form, but that it is a hybrid and transitory building, and its unfinished or ruinous state is not a decline but intrinsic to its very being. It is thus a sort of monster itself, as Camille observes, quoting Hugo: “This central, generative church is a sort of chimera among the old churches of Paris: it has the head of one, the limbs of another, the cruppers of a third; something of all of them”. 69 This idea is further elaborated with the appearance of Quasimodo. Who or what is he if not the very cathedral in its most fragile, monstrous, subjective state? He appears not as an organic body, but as a disgusting bag of loose organs gazing at us, and eager to bite, as Hugo writes: It was a very angular and very lively little mass, imprisoned in its linen sack, stamped with the cipher of Messire Guillaume Chartier, then bishop of Paris, with a head projecting. That head was deformed enough; one beheld only a forest of red hair, one eye, a mouth, and teeth. The eye wept, the mouth cried, and the teeth seemed to ask only to be allowed to bite. 70 66 “Quasi modo geniti infantes, alleluia: rationabiles, sine dolo lac concupiscite”, as it is written in Peter 2: 2. 67 Quoted in Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame (see n. 29), 257. 68 Suzanne Nash, “Writing a Building: Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris”, in: French Forum 8 (1983), 122-133. 69 Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame (see n. 29), 86-7. 70 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, trans. Isabel F.-Hapgood, Altenmünster: Jazzybee Verlag 2017, 91. The Monstrosity of Early Music 393 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 393 | 25.09.2023 Hugo here seems to follow Hegel’s (equally monstrous and emancipatory) idea of Christianity as the kenotic process of God becoming a man of sorrows, or better, a monstrous piece of shit. 71 His novel’s whole revolutionary subjective potentiality seems to come from this confrontation with the cathedral in the guise of a monstrous object. 72 To clarify Hugo’s position, it suffices to focus on his ambiguous statements about restoring the remnants of the past. 73 (Of course, this ambiguity resonates perfectly with how he articulated his own post-revolutionary position of profound loss-- something that seemed to make him rather conservative-- which he worked through to engage in a radically emancipatory artistic and political project.) Instead of looking for master signifiers, Hugo’s radical identification with the symptom transforms the abstract universality of his musicographe contemporaries (based on master signifiers and the exclusion of the monstrous) into a concrete universality based on his own subjective entanglement with the Other’s unknown monstrosity. For Hugo, Gothic buildings are by definition “opera interrupta”-- always somehow interrupted or abandoned, never really finished 74 - - and it is in this interruption that change can be located. The historical process is one not of solidification, but of intrinsic alienation: the condition for the birth of subjectivity. 75 Identification with the symptom, with the monster, opens onto a real subjective engagement with the past that does not create enjoyment through an excluded obstacle, but seeing this exclusion itself as the possibility for universality. 76 As an artist, Hugo does not 71 Based on Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, Paradox or Dialectic? , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2009; and Sean Christopher Hall,- “Holy Shit: Excremental Philosophy, Religious Ontology, and Spiritual Revelation”, in: The International Journal of Žižek Studies 15/ 1 (2021), n.p.. In several places in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel calls the incarnation of God in Christ “monstrous” (ungeheuer): Georg W. F.-Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume 3: The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter C.-Hodgson, Cambridge University Press 2007, 125, 214, 315 72 This resonates with Hegel’s view of the Gothic cathedral as a black hole in which the subject vanishes, as described in a letter to his wife after he visited the unfinished but ruin-like Cologne Cathedral in 1822. See: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich-Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984, 585. 73 Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame (see n. 29), 71-113. 74 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, Paris: Gallimard 1974, 162. 75 The fantasy of solidity informed Fétis’s defense of Western tonal supremacy, finding a sinister resonance in the slightly later writings of comparative musicologist Robert Lach. See, especially, the latter’s comparative study: Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der ornamentalen Melopöie, Leipzig: C. F.-Kahnt Nachfolger 1913. 76 For an elaboration of this idea, see Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics, New York: Columbia University Press 2020. Björn Schmelzer 394 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 394 | 25.09.2023 believe in a restoration of the past, as his statement on the subject makes clear: “There are two ways of destroying a monument, by restoration and by demolition. The second way, which is naive, is preferable to the first, which is absurd”. 77 So, while he regrets the loss of the past, interestingly he does not believe in restoration (revivalism), nor does he glorify the past by seeing it as purely harmonious. Rather he tries to articulate a strange connection to the past based on the similar non-belonging or alienation of medieval subjects, akin to Hardy’s description of the mummers, or the status of nineteenth-century chanters. 78 Saving Notre-Dame from demolition therefore does not mean restoring it according to a regressive fantasy of the non-existent (glorious) past: Hugo even opposes cleaning its darkened, dirty façade (“the colour of the centuries. The only beauty time gives to edifices”). 79 What is to be done, then, if there is, on the one hand, loss and the lament of loss, and on the other no possible overcoming of this loss, since grabbing onto new master signifiers is not an option either? Notre-Dame de Paris-- an artwork that can never be mistaken for a master signifier-- is Hugo’s response. 80 It leaves room for lament and loss, but also addresses these as potentially dangerous fantasies of restoration that, parasite-like draw their nourishment from the phantasmatic enjoyment of exclusion, of that which blocks the way to a final realisation of the fantasy. Of course, the logic here is that it is precisely on behalf of this stumbling block that the fantasy can exist in the first place, this stumbling block being, as we have seen, alienating modernity (Germany), or monstrous anachronistic remainders of the past (France). Hugo’s novel does not seek to restore but instead performs an intrinsic contradiction, capturing not just the grandeur or monstrosity of the historical Other, but its split; and therein lies the book’s power. Hugo’s ambiguous stance is amusingly illustrated by Zola’s description of Flaubert’s funeral, in all its discursive parapraxis. While Zola is usually on the side of the lower classes, here, perhaps overwhelmed by a fit of anticlericalism, he considers the monstrous performance of the chanters as somehow unworthy of a man of Flaubert’s status. It is precisely Zola’s bourgeois slip that enables us to imagine what would have been the perfect send-off for Hugo- - had he not, ironically, received a French state funeral with more than two million attendees: I was in the choir, in front of the singers. There were five of them, lined up in front of a broken lectern, mounted on stools that lifted them off the ground like Japanese dolls strung 77 Quoted in Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame (see n. 29), 86. 78 For the concept of universal non-belonging, see: McGowan, Universality (see n. 76). 79 Quoted in Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame (see n. 29), 86. 80 The shift from master to missing signifier is nicely exemplified in the first English translation (in 1833 by Frederic Shoberl) of the original title of Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which would become the standard English name of the book. The Monstrosity of Early Music 395 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 395 | 25.09.2023 on sticks; five louts dressed in dirty surplices and whose heavy shoes could be seen; five cane-heads, brick-coloured, hewn with bill hooks, crooked mouths screaming Latin. And it never ended; they made mistakes, missed their lines like bad actors who don’t know their part. A young man, certainly the son of his old neighbour, had a shrill, heartrending voice, like the cry of an animal being slaughtered. Little by little anger rose in me, I was furious and sorry for this equality in death, for this great man whom these people buried with their routine, without an emotion, spitting on his coffin the same false notes and the same empty sentences that they would have spat on the coffin of a fool. 81 Does Hugo’s position not recall that of E. T.A.- Hoffmann, twenty years earlier? Dramaturge, composer, and author of uncanny tales that widely inspired Gothic and fantastic literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hoffmann was the first to put his finger on the modern Romantic through his analysis of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; yet at the same time, seemingly in contradiction to this, he was also one of the first to imagine a return to ancient church music, viewing Palestrina as a protagonist of classic purity and childlike honesty. In a recent article, Craig Comen has indicated how, for Hoffmann and his fellow musical Romantics, the origin (in the Benjaminian sense of a split) of Early Music- - or, as they called it, naïve music- - lay in fractured modernity itself, or rather in its traumatic and alienating effects, which retroactively produced the fantasy of a musical paradise lost. 82 While Romantic philosophers situated this paradise in Ancient Greece, where they assumed a harmonious resonance existed between culture and society, Hoffmann and his ilk placed this prelapsarian period (strangely enough, almost as a sort of insular utopian fantasy) nowhere else than in sixteenth-century Rome. Taken together, Hoffmann’s two important musical essays- - the first, in 1810, about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and the second, in 1814, about old and new church music- - constitute a perfect allegory of the situation in which artists and intellectuals of his time then found themselves. 83 In short, one could say that the trauma of modernity was articulated both via the monstrosity of the present, and its fundamentally alienating art production, and via nostalgia for an immaculate lost past and its immediately accessible art. The past was associated with Palestrina; modernity with Beethoven. Palestrina’s naïve music was “bold, 81 Quoted in: Xavier Bisaro, Chanter toujours. Plain-chant et religion villageoise dans la France moderne (XVIe-XIXe siècle), Rennes: PUR 2010, 202. 82 Craig Comen, “Hoffmann’s Musical Modernity and the Pursuit of Sentimental Unity”, in: Eighteenth-Century Music 15/ 1 (2018), 9-28. 83 Both essays are included in: E. T.A.-Hoffmann, E. T.A.-Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana; the Poet and the Composer; Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. Björn Schmelzer 396 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 396 | 25.09.2023 with powerful chords, blazing forth like blinding shafts of light” from consonant to consonant-- “simple, true, childlike, good, strong, and sturdy”, 84 the embodiment of pietistic sublimity; whereas Beethoven was passionate, twisted, sublime and monstrous. 85 Hoffmann presumed that, to understand Palestrina, no analysis or criticism was needed, for, chord after chord, this functional liturgical music was understood by all, in contrast to Beethoven’s modern music, which did not speak for itself, and was (to quote Comen’s paraphrase of the dismissive point of view of Hoffmann’s colleague Ludwig Tieck) “like sorcery gone awry, a perversion of traditional order, a volatile juxtaposition of opposing images, a sounding art form rooted in catastrophic loss”. 86 In this sense, by fundamentally rupturing direct identification with the work, it was the perfect illustration of society’s own monstrosity. The paradox, of course, is that it was exactly the “break” of modernity that made people aware of what they had lost, instilling in them the desire to reveal or relive what they had never really had; Romanticism thus created the imaginary of a lost union with nature, religion, culture, identity and ethnicity. Of course, Hoffmann’s empirical ideas about music from the past were evidently very limited, as was his historical knowledge of ancient repertoires. In his case things were yet more complex, contradictions seeming to accumulate. For example, all the while associating the immaculate past with Palestrina, Hoffmann simultaneously propagated an image of the past-- highly influential for his own fiction of the grotesque-- that was principally tied to the artworks of French engraver Jacques Callot, but also to the demonic Italian painter Salvator Rosa, whose biography seemed as important for Hoffmann as his actual artistic production, as well as to infernal medieval writers like Dante. One can only speculate how he would have absorbed Gesualdo’s uncanny works, or late ars subtilior polyphony, had he had the opportunity to encounter them. Hoffmann’s interest in a detail from Callot’s delirious engraving The Temptation of St. Anthony (Figure 4)- - which Flaubert owned and which profoundly inspired his novel on the saint- - proves that he was not totally unfamiliar with glimpses of monstrosity linked to the performance of Ancien Régime polyphony. Hoffmann describes it in some detail in the prefatory lines of his Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner, writing of “the clarinettist (in the same picture)-who requires 84 Quoted in Comen, “Hoffmann’s musical modernity” (see n. 82), 16. 85 As Hoffmann writes in his 1813 essay “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music”: “Thus Beethoven’s instrumental music opens up to us also the realm of the monstrous and the immeasurable [das Reich des Ungeheuern und Unermeßlichen]”. See: Source Readings in Music History. From Classical Antiquity through the Romantic Era, ed. Oliver Strunk, New York: W. W.- Norton 1950, 777. 86 Comen, “Hoffmann’s Musical Modernity” (see n. 82), 19. The Monstrosity of Early Music 397 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 397 | 25.09.2023 a quite singular bodily organ in order to provide enough wind for his instrument […] [is] equally delightful”. 87 Of course, one might observe that this is just another (monstrous) version of the “living lectern” at which the singers stand, read, and sing polyphony. Here it is a weird creature with wings that holds the choirbook, while the singers are all animals (two ducks in the front in typical chanter surplices, a donkey with glasses, a fox for a choirmaster, etc.) or monsters (one singing and playing the lute, reminiscent of a figure in Bosch’s Temptation triptych). Although there are some Renaissance illustrations of animals singing around a choir book-- for example in the songbook of Zeghere van Male-- and there is a Temptation of St. Anthony by Maerten De Vos (1594) where monsters are singing from polyphonic partbooks, Callot was likely unaware of these, and this remarkable depiction of monstrous singers was his own invention. Another possible interpretation is that, for Hoffmann, as for certain other German Romantics, modernity started with the Thirty Years’ War: Germany missed the French Revolution, but the Reformation and the bloody peasant and inde- 87 Hoffmann, Prefatory lines to the Fantasy-Pictures in the Style of Callot, in: E. T.A.- Hoffmann’s Musical Writings (see n. 83), 77. Fig. 4: Jacques Callot, detail from The Temptation of Saint Anthony [2nd version]. 1635. Washington D. C., National Gallery of Art. Public Domain. Björn Schmelzer 398 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 398 | 25.09.2023 pendence wars it sparked in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were interpreted as a revolution causing the same kind of long-running trauma. In this sense, Palestrina was still pre-modern, while artists like Callot, with his series of breathtaking anti-war engravings, anticipating the series by Goya, were already fully immersed in the traumatic effects of early modernity. Hoffmann’s apparent dualism proves much more dialectic on closer inspection. For Hoffmann, it is not just that Beethoven was chaotic and alienating, but rather that it was Beethoven himself who continued the religious tradition of Palestrina (similarly to the way Nietzsche would later see in Wagner a true follower of Palestrina, against the disaster of the recitative style), a tradition lost when liturgical music submitted itself to a frivolous bourgeois music of entertainment. But this new form of secularised religious music (especially and paradoxically articulated through instrumental music) could not just be glorious and triumphant, it also had to include contradiction and destabilization (thus, from the outset, the idea of absolute music involved the inclusion and reconciliation of a profound contradiction). In Hoffmann’s view, if Beethoven was a monstrosity and a corruption, he was a (secularised)-religious one that subverted mediocre bourgeois culture. However, similarly to Hugo, the real dialectical Durcharbeitung (“working through”) of Hoffmann’s position would appear only in his tales: incredible fabulations of the odd and uncanny. It was here that he reconciled the traumatic dichotomy of an unbearable, monstrous present and a past that was irrevocably lost. Might we not read the opening and closing tales of his collection Nachtstücke (1817), the influential “The Sandman” and lesser known “The Sanctus”, as unconscious variations on what he was working through? The first might be understood as a story about the non-acceptance of this lost past, the death of the father being the loss of Early Music or a problem with symbolic castration akin to the French fantasy of the lost past returning as a monstrous double-- the chanters, or here the evil doppelgänger Coppola / Coppelius-- that tries to attack and corrupt the father figure(s). 88 The only way the protagonist can overcome his predicament is to dive into the fantasy of a perfect love object: a puppet or automaton. Particularly apt for my subject is the moment when Olympia, whom the protagonist loves, and whose professor-father is a surrogate father to the protagonist, dances and performs a bravura aria. In reality, she is an automaton, but the protagonist seems not to realise this and even leaves his fiancée for her, his narcissistic infatuation making him 88 To continue the analogy, and informed by Freud, one could claim that, in the split between the good father and the bad father, Palestrina stands for the good, while Callot embodies the bad, monstrous father. The Monstrosity of Early Music 399 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 399 | 25.09.2023 blind to her all too stiff and brilliant performance, while the reader understands what is going on. 89 Hoffmann’s variation on the Pygmalion myth can only end badly, as with any fantasy that is realised: the puppet is destroyed in a gruesome manner and the protagonist commits suicide. To pursue my analogy, one could claim that the fantasy of an (im)possible return of the music of the past can only be sustained by the exorcism of the fake doppelgänger and evil sham survivors of the (un)dead father, alongside the narcissistically charged performance of an automaton. However, Hoffmann’s tale teaches us that, in the end, such performances can never work. Every return of the music of the past seems to shatter between monsters and automata. 90 In “The Sanctus”, the protagonist Bettina, a skilled professional singer, hurriedly leaves a church as the choir sings the Sanctus in order to perform entertaining music at a women’s salon and subsequently loses her voice. Reduced by her father to her beautiful voice, the means by which the pair earn their living (to the extent that the father begs the doctor to poison her, as once deprived of her voice, she has become useless), she finally recovers with the therapeutic help of a travelling enthusiast-- a recurring character in many Hoffmann tales-- during an enlightening conversation with her father and other influential people. Crucially, however, Hoffmann doesn’t have Bettina return to the church, as one might expect, but rather, in a final twist revealing his true intentions, has her accept her historic / symbolic castration by singing Early Music (in the more recent shape of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater). She does so neither in the church nor in the salons- - these poles seeming to embody Hoffmann’s predicament, namely the choice between recovering the lost sublime of the past or falling into the trap of commercial entertainment- - but in “a moderate sized room”: a rather vague description of what might be interpreted as Hoffmann’s not yet fully defined, in-between space for new potential performances of old repertoires, accepting their current alienated status. By Way of Conclusion So, what is this monstrosity that seemingly haunts these nineteenth-century endeavours connected to historicism, balanced between existence and non-existence, threatened by domestication and destruction? Could we not claim that this Ding-aspect characterises all encounters with others or the Other, and equally all 89 E. T.A.-Hoffmann, The Best Tales of Hoffmann, ed. E. F.-Bleiler, New York: Dover Publications 1967, 205. 90 Danjou (“Nouvelles diverses”, see n. 63, 47) calls the chantres “machines beuglantes”- - a-term borrowed from Adolphe-Napoléon Didron, who applied it to church organs-- because of their routine singing, ignorance and loud monstrous sound. Björn Schmelzer 400 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 400 | 25.09.2023 encounters with the musical, historical Other in listening and performance-- that it is an artistic negotiation, expression and appropriation of some otherness wrapped in sound? 91 What is called monstrosity is an encounter with the Other’s excessive otherness- - its unknown, terrifying element. This experience is linked to our own fantasies, and it is the Other’s ungraspable mystery, in the artwork, that conditions our own subjective engagement, or better, our subjectivity as such; subjectivity is always constructed through experiencing one’s blind spot in the Other. The impossibility of knowing this monstrous Thing provokes an urge to disavow or even destroy. However, art in general might be perceived as a free, open, and usually voluntary exposure to this traumatic encounter, typically without any further mental or physical after-effects. That is why, bluntly stated, art exists: it mediates and exercises this traumatic encounter. How is it then that, when we are dealing with music of the past, this Dingdimension can provoke such traumatic displeasure? Or, put differently: is Early Music in particular a way of disavowing or rerouting the artistic encounter with the Thing so that it simultaneously produces a new type of listener / performer constituted by the phantasmatic mechanism of the loss of a harmonious past? This might mean that Early Music is not just the counter-effect of the birth of modern music, the alienating exposure of the Thing, but that it is also the belief that it might be possible to (re-)engage with a music without a Thing by imagining that music in the past did not have such a traumatic kernel, that it did not need mediation or explanation, that it was directly accessed and enjoyed without any mediation in a society where all symbolic roles were clear and operated perfectly harmoniously. Clearly the realisation of such a dream could only become a nightmare ending in the shattering of the fantasy, 92 the concrete attempt to realise the fantasy (“making Early Music great again”) representing a problem for its own continuation. Therefore, this kind of listener / performer prefers to hear ascetic, strippeddown, almost mechanical early music performances, while enjoying the detection and exorcism of stains, imperfections, monstrosities, moments of ignorance, subjective initiatives, and impure mediations: all elements badly needed and at the same time necessarily dismissed to sustain the fantasy of a perfect future rendition and the return of the unmediated past. Enjoyment appears through the absence or blocking of what is being fantasised about. The performance is a stumbling block 91 The concept of “das Ding” (“the Thing”) was coined by Sigmund Freud and further developed by Jacques Lacan. For a general exploration of it, see: Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, Metapsychology after Lacan, London and New York: Routledge 2001, 204-240. 92 On fantasy realised, see: Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso 2008, 7-9; and the film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), where he comments: “We have a perfect name for fantasy realised. It’s called nightmare”. The Monstrosity of Early Music 401 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 401 | 25.09.2023 that produces enjoyment, all the while necessarily failing. To be clear: it is not that the old master signifiers have been renounced. They are intact but now operate in a field of shattered, imperfect performance. Such master signifiers are commonplace in music history because music is not just an art but also a performance practice (its condition). They appear in the guise of normative, prescriptive rules and descriptive expertise, stocked in manuals and treatises concerning how one must do things, which rules are to be followed and which avoided, what the performance’s aim is, how it functions and how it does not. Musical historicism focusing on performance practice is basically the mapping of these performance habits and rules which sustain, in a very concrete way, the implicit master signifiers, as though these normative instructions one is to obey and fulfil are directly identifiable by anyone in any given culture. As such, performances of historical repertoires are commonly seen as the concrete illustration of these master signifiers. Music without the Thing-aspect is stripped of the essential art-aspect, retaining only its artisanal quality. It reduces or domesticates Early Music, which becomes a form of functional Hausmusik or, even more appropriately, Gebrauchsmusik, disavowing that music is intrinsically dislocated and that this dislocation is the condition of it being art in the first place. 93 This position of course evokes what Adorno once called the “resentment listener”, 94 whose origin or historical horizon I have been trying to explore here, showing that it is impossible to disconnect this phantasmatic structure from the invention and continuation of Early Music. One of the famous master signifiers that helped to sustain the historicoartistic fantasy of non-alienated art is that of Greek antiquity as a universal model for early Romanticism. It involved the idea of a perfectly harmonious society whose artworks expressed this harmony directly, without mediation. Of course, the traumatic experience of the rupture of modernity in the nineteenth century meant that this model became en vogue again, stimulating nostalgia for the possibility of a society without dissonance. Surprisingly, the model was easily cut and pasted onto very different historical periods, depending on the ideological goal in mind. We have seen how easily the fantasy of a non-mediated, harmonious society and culture was transposed to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, helping to support the idea of Early Music as a pure, authentic and uncorrupted contrast to modern, Romantic art and music. 95 Although this was the position of Romantics 93 Besseler, “Appendix: Fundamental Issues” (see n. 12), 49-70. 94 Theodor W.-Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B.-Ashton, New York: Seabury 1976, 9-12. 95 Ironically, even Greek antique music, using instruments, did not really fit the fantasy of unmediated, spontaneous art, making only sixteenth-century Rome a realistic candidate. Björn Schmelzer 402 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 402 | 25.09.2023 such as Thibaut, Grell and even Hoffmann, for an extremely influential philosopher like Hegel it clearly was not at all the case. 96 For Hegel, modern, Romantic art started with the fracture produced by Christianity (Hegel’s interpretation of alienation is derived from the theological concept of kenosis, translated by Luther as Entäusserung: externalisation and subjectivity, God’s self-emptying, or self-alienation in Christ). 97 As I have tried to show, Hugo’s exceptional idea of Gothic art as split from itself, and including its own ruin, seems to resonate with Hegel’s point of view. The fantasy of intrinsically non-alienated medieval and Renaissance music could only be sustained by a superficial reading of Hegel. Moreover, the whole idea of reconstructing or re-enacting art “wie es eigentlich gewesen”, to use Von Ranke’s maxim of historism, was an absurdity for Hegel-- an idea that, as he saw it, came into vogue with Schlegel and Herder but could never be stripped of subjective involvement. 98 Hugo also follows Hegel in his idea of concrete universality when he abandons the abstract universal interpretation of the Gothic, so common in his time, and subjectifies it into a (monstrous) particular that might stand in for concrete universality. One could profitably re-read music history from the point of the absent signifier of monstrosity. Amongst numerous books in this new direction, three are particularly worthy of mention, linking music history to a missing signifier rather than to universal normativity or a master signifier. All three share the idea of the “queer” musical subject: Bruce W.- Holsinger’s study on twelfth and thirteenth-century Parisian organum singers connected to the missing signifier of sodomy; 99 Anna Zayaruznaya’s book on the missing signifier of monstrosity, forming the ars nova motet (Philippe de Vitry, etc.); 100 and Rob Wegman’s book on the crisis of late fifteenth-century music, again connected to a missing signifier, and exemplified by the works of Alexander Agricola, which Hulrich Brätel (1536) 96 On the ambiguous personal relations between Thibaut and Hegel, see: Otto Pöggeler, “Hegel und Heidelberg”, in: Hegel-Studien,-vol. 6, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag 65-133. Here he writes: “Die puristischen Züge, die der Musikliebhaberei Thibauts anhaften, sind Hegel fremd”. (97). 97 For Hegel and kenosis, see: Alex Dubilet, The Self-Emptying Subject, Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval and Modern, New York: Fordham University Press 2018. 98 Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975, 269-270. 99 See, especially, Chapter 4 of Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire (see n. 26). 100 Anna Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015. The Monstrosity of Early Music 403 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 403 | 25.09.2023 aptly articulated as “seltzam art, verkärth, auf frembd Manier”, or one would say today: weird, unrecognisable, queer and alienating. 101 Music history is continuously rehearsing these quasi-modern interruptions, as if the experience of alienation and modernity, this weird non-existing signifier without a name, is the real universal of history itself, and the past a (dis)continuity of cracks. Of course, every rupture also produces dangerous new master signifiers; every traumatic experience of loss potentially substantialises this loss and retroactively constructs it into the past, to which the alienating contemporary blocks one’s access. Walter Benjamin describes what has been fantasised as various paradises lost more appropriately as the continuous, catastrophic piling-up of heaps of garbage and ruins. 102 In this sense, the history of Western music in the last millennium can be perceived as the history of modernity, modernity being just another name for structural incompleteness, which art encircles, and without whose gaps we would have merely knowledge, communication, and religion. Music-historical research could be focused on these gaps, and on how musical works articulate them in different periods and in different ways. But likely it is musical performance that is best placed to conduct such an enquiry for the encounter with the Thing, which is also the gap, only possible through performance and listening-- the Thing being the element that makes trouble and is disavowed by science and historical knowledge, which are eager to replace it by a signifier. Yet, for all its excessive presence, it is some Thing which is missing, and on behalf of which one manages to cling onto historical master signifiers. The unknown- - let us say, the artistic element- - in art is articulated not through knowledge or craftsmanship but through artistic absence, which is far more diffuse, involving a partly uncontrollable expressiveness, an artistic alienation that falls out of the structure of knowledge and control. Yet this monstrous Thing, which makes an artwork properly artistic, is intolerable for the resentment listener-- for it is a confrontation with one’s own proper (divided)-subjectivity (the subject’s inscription in the work of art exactly through this unknown Thing, and through which the subject emerges). This Thing or monstrosity, or better one’s relation to it, is a sort of ungraspable but transhistorical element, which precisely because of its transhistorical dimension must be disavowed or destroyed. 101 Brätel’s quote translates literally: “weird, wrong, in a strange manner”. Rob C.-Wegman. The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470-1530, London and New York: Routledge 2005. See, also: Markus Roth, “Agricola und das Verkehrte. Zum Umgang mit satztechnischen Idiosynkrasien in Musik des späten 15. Jahrhunderts”, in: Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 15/ 1 (2018), 7-28. 102 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, in: Selected Writings, 4: 1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W.-Jennings, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2006, 392. Björn Schmelzer 404 SV_ 978-3-7965-4972-4_Cazaux_Christelle_Tanz_Druck | Seite 404 | 25.09.2023 Returning to the French chanters: it is not that they embody a way of performing that could be considered truer, more historical, or more authentic; on the contrary, they are a hole in historical signification. They are not connected to any historical truth, and it is precisely this fact that transforms what they do into a presumed excess of ignorance or subjective involvement, confronting Early Music historists and historicists with their own lack. This also means that subjectivity is not about what one decides to do but is basically a matter of the musical work or score itself. It is the hole in the score-- that point of attachment that makes us split subjects, or objects, of the score. This idea of becoming the score’s object (or split subject) is unbearable for the resentment listener / performer, who seeks a wholeness and control, informed by historical knowledge, and does not tolerate uncanny elements that would reverse the traditional subject-object positions, namely a score that gazes at us and confronts us with our own blind spot through the hole of its gaze. 103 Transhistorical universality is to be found in this transposition from the performer / listener as an ego-subject clinging to master signifiers (history, Early Music), to the performer / listener as a universal object accepting a void of knowledge for a missing signifier. Should we then renounce Early Music as a conservative fantasy, or can we transform this fantasy so as not to leave the (musical) past and its remains in the wrong hands? To do so would mean renouncing the revivalist dream, accepting both the intrinsic alienation of art, and the fact that historical knowledge can never redeem an encounter with the impossible. 103 For the concept of the blind spot or gaze in the work of art, see: Jacques Lacan, “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a”, in: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, London and New York: W. W.-Norton 1978: 67-122.