Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration
(Oxford University Press, 2017)
In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigour at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights.
The book’s theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates over relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.
Reviews
“The classics are back. Naomi Waltham-Smith lifts the critical analysis of style to the next level with the freshest and most radical reimagining of the classical masters we have sen in a long time. In prose of fire and fervour, Waltham-Smith puts Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in the ring with Badiou, Agamben, and Nancy and raises the stakes in what it means for music to be human. A performance of dazzling intellectual virtuosity.”
—Michael Spitzer, University of Liverpool
“Do not enter these pages expecting to find the Viennese Classical Style of your peers. Brace yourself instead for a complete repurposing of every element of that style and of almost everything that has been said about it. Northing is lost on Naomi Waltham-Smith, and it is exhilarating to watch her wrest this music from its perceived foundations and urge it unto the teeming vortex of her critical imaginary.”
—Scott Burnham, CUNY
“This book is a study of belonging, property, the proper, labour, sovereignty, community, the common, friendship, fraternity, voice, and a whole world of cognate concepts and discourses that have come to assume great importance in the theoretical humanities. With great aplomb, Naomi Waltham-Smith shows that these concepts are both present within—articulated and inscribed by—the musical discourse of the Classical Style, and yet at the same time inflected by it: challenged, resisted by the music. . . . Music has become more complex, not less—a wonderful provocation.”
—Anthony Gritten, Music & Letters
“A great strength ofWaltham-Smith’s critical approach is her reimagining of well-known musical moments that become astonishing once again within the context of her illuminating analyses. . . Perhaps Waltham-Smith’s most significant accomplishment, however, is the way she boldly weds musical insight to a political project of remarkable ambition.”
—Beth Snyder, Eighteenth-Century Music