Review of Judy Lochhead, Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music (Routledge, 2015)

[1] It is rare when reading a book-length music-theoretical work, especially one with a foot firmly in continental philosophical terrain, to wish for the volume to be twice as long as it is. But that was frequently my desire reading Judy Lochhead's Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music.[2] The reasons for this are threefold. First, Lochhead's book covers a lot of ground. The four chapters that comprise Part I function together as a critical reading of the recent history of music-analytic inquiry, a timely intervention into some issues and assumptions in need of address, and a creative plane on which many philosophical concepts come into communication. Part II then comprises a series of analytical forays, each offering a way to engage some particular "problem." Part II also focuses on compositions by four living woman composers, a commendable effort in itself.(1)[3] Second, the book is conceptually rich. Drawing upon and inflecting myriad sources--Ihde's creative reading of Husserl's phenomenology, Heidegger's ontologies of things and worlds, Deleuze's difference, Haraway's situated knowing, and much more--it offers a wealth of music-analytic perspectives that a reader might pick up and carry into new territory. Common terms in music-scholarly discourse are taken apart and redeployed. Assumptions about what "counts" as analytically fruitful loci of attention are overturned.[4] Third, on a slightly less affirmative note, the brevity of the volume often results in a discouraging lack of development of any given thread. A tremendous amount of material is packed into 175 pages. But while several themes "flicker" (to use one of Lochhead's concepts) throughout, many get swept up in the flow, never to appear again. (I will address some instances of this below.) This seems to be Lochhead's gambit, however, and while it requires patience on the reader's part, that patience pays off--if, that is, we read Part I not as a stream of interesting and important points, each aborted prematurely before moving on to the next, but instead as a slow accumulation of concepts. No single theme animates Reconceiving Structure, and that is the point: a productive analytic model, emerging as it does from specific acts of engaging a "musical sounding," should not be guided by a priori ideas of how music should go. The compositions Lochhead examines, each of which resists approach via traditional music-analytic means, bring this fact to the forefront. But the lesson underlying Lochhead's mode of inquiry is that all music should be approached in this way--that through the radically singular ontological status of "recent music" (4ff.) we can rethink what structure means for any kind of musical situation.[5] Part I begins with a historical account of how music analysis, as practiced by certain European and North American musical thinkers, has come to be what it is. Lochhead describes the alignment of music-analytic inquiry with scientific discourse in the post-war years, focusing in large part on ways in which scientific rigor was brought into alignment with music-compositional practice. I encourage the reader to read these early passages alongside, say, the Haraway text that Lochhead cites, which remains one of the more powerful critiques of scientism in contemporary scholarship (Haraway 1988; see Lochhead pp. 8-9, 89, and 98-99).[6] Chapter 2 inquires into what is meant by structure in music-scholarly discourse and critical theory. Lochhead describes four prevailing perspectives:1. structure as an ontological condition--either "that which lies 'underneath' the concrete details" (48) of the musical surface, or a metaphysical structure toward which a work aspires,2. structure conceived in opposition to (a) non-structural elements, (b) process, and (c) expression or meaning,3. inquiry into structure as a "way in"--epistemological considerations of how and why to think about structure,4. …