








































REFLECTIONS

Event or Ephemeron? Music’s Sound, 
Performance, and Media
A Critical Reflection on the Thought of 
Carolyn Abbate
Martin Scherzinger

All hear the sound gladly, 
that rounds itself into a note.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-östlicher Divan) 

… if our ears were ten times more sensitive, 
we would hear matter roar—and presumably nothing else. 

(Friedrich Kittler, The Truth of the Technological World)1

Mimesis Awry

“What does it mean to write about performed music? About an opera live 
and unfolding in time and not an operatic work? Shouldn’t this be what we 

* This essay would not exist without the considerable benefits of interlocution. In par-
ticular, I would like to thank Giorgio Biancorosso, Gianmario Borio, Alessandro Cecchi, 
James Currie, Carlo Lanfossi, and Emilio Sala for their engagement and encouragement in 
the writing of this text. I would also like to thank Carolyn Abbate, Amy Bauer, Seth Brodsky, 
Amy Cimini, Michael Gallope, Stephen Decatur Smith, Lydia Goehr, Berthold Hoeckner, 
Maryam Moshaver, Kelli Moore, Alexander Rehding, Holly Watkins, Emily White, and many 
others (too numerous to name), for their generous engagements with me over the years. 
The themes I raise here weighed upon our thinking particularly in the early years of the 
first decade of the twenty-first century, and are today marked by a certain nostalgia for the 
strident gaze toward the future we shared as young scholars at the dawn of a new era. This 
essay is dedicated to them all. One of the eight sections (“The Privileged Audility of Perfor-
mance”) of this essay appears in my “Music’s Techno-Chronemics,” in Investigating Musical 
Performance: Theoretical Models and Intersections, ed. Gianmario Borio, Alessandro Cecchi, 
Giovanni Giuriati and Marco Lutzu (London: Routledge, 2020), 69–88 and another section 
(“On the Ethics of Abstinence”) appears in “The Ambiguous Ethics of Music’s Ineffability: A 
Brief Reflection on the Recent Thought of Michael Gallope and Carolyn Abbate,” Journal of 
the Royal Musical Association 145, no. 1 (2020): 229–250, reproduced here with permission.

1 Both quotations are from Friedrich A. Kittler, The Truth of the Technological World: 
Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 
2013), 170–171.

Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2021), pp. 145–192.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. DOI: 10.13130/sss15335.



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do, since we love music for its reality, for voices and sounds that linger long 
after they are no longer there? Love is not based on great works as unper-
formed abstractions or even as subtended by an imagined or hypothetical 
performance.”2 These are the opening lines of Carolyn Abbate’s much-cited 
essay “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?”. The essay, written almost two decades 
ago, is a fine-tuned elaboration of what can be described as a general turn to 
affect in the Humanities at the turn of the century. In particular, Abbate’s 
text functioned as a kind of clarion call to North American music schol-
arship: if Lawrence Kramer’s new musicology decentered music’s perceived 
formalism by way of hermeneutics in the 1990s, Abbate’s text decentered 
both formalism and hermeneutics (newly allied in her analysis) by way of 
affect in the first decade of the twenty-first century. 

What follows is a granular reflection on some of the central claims in 
“Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” as well as some of the argumentative maneu-
vers deployed to make them. This involves scrutiny not only of the tensions 
grounding the definitional reach of the terms of argument, but also of their 
influence on the dialectics of musical performance, the role of media and 
technology in human sonic experience, and, finally, the question concern-
ing morals, ethics, and perhaps politics. I will conclude with three primary 
points. First, I will locate in Abbate’s prescient text an unexpected gnos-
tic-determinate thrust (or ontological commitment), awkwardly situated in 
the context of an argument about the drastic-indeterminate character of 
music (characterized by ontological withdrawal). Second, I will show that, 
given the successful overcoming of this contradiction, the argument for the 
drastic is not properly allied with the ethical or political positions to which 
it lays claim. Instead, the radically open-ended construal of drastic expe-
rience engages ethics and politics in a way that paradoxically forecloses its 
element of incipience and recalcitrance. Third, although they specify their 
ethico-political commitments quite differently, I will show how then-con-
temporary texts addressing the concept of affect—in particular, those by 
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht—too bear the marks of a similar foreclosure. The 
uncanny return of unwanted fixed meanings, basic categories, and gnostic 
determinations in a philosophy oriented toward presence and drastic open-
ness is symptomatic of a hyperbolic construal of the opposition between 
language and affect—held firmly in the inertial grip of a centuries-old 
Western dialectic. 

2 Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 505, em-
phasis added. Page numbers for references to this article will be given directly in the main text.



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Allow me a few scattered remarks about my approach to this critical re-
flection. Against the reticence advanced as an ethical response to music’s 
drastic core (in Abbate’s account), my approach is perhaps exaggeratedly 
loquacious. It is an attempt to track the nuance of Abbate’s argument down 
to the letter, thereby consciously even bypassing its spirit from time to time. 
But mobilizing a mode of literalism (or what one might call affective apha-
sia) is one of the central points of this reflection. In other words, it refuses 
the unspecified spirit of the argument to act as a clandestine handhold for 
its deeper significance. This is an attempt, one might say, to sing to music’s 
drastic potential a tune of its own making—a case of mimesis awry, or even 
mimicry. In other words, what is most important about Abbate’s essay is 
not necessarily the coherent philosophical picture it frames, but all manner 
of brilliant observation it proffers along the way. In the years following its 
publication, Abbate’s essay was met with considerable (and often surpris-
ingly) negative reaction. But the vivid reaction to the essay was itself symp-
tomatic of a kind of fascinated protesting, as if to strike a nerve at the heart 
of an institutionalized inertia. In reality, the essay had a lasting impact on 
music studies; and to the extent it was not actually influential on them, the 
essay catalyzed (or at least prefigured) a host of new inquiries in the first 
two decades of the twenty-first century—the turn to musical performance, 
the turn to musical timbre, the turn to musical ineffability, and of course 
the turn to affect.3 

One important critique to emerge in the context of contemporary af-
fect theory today relates to the way the libidinal drives (of the drastic) are 
coopted in the context of advanced capitalism. The perceptual specificity of 
music’s drastic experience—and mutatis mutandis its autonomic affective 
intensity, pre-attentive timbre recognition, irreducible ineffability, etc.—
about which visualizations and representations (from notations and tran-
scriptions to cultural and social associations and qualia, by way of spectrum 
plots, temporal envelope outlines, and spectrograms) are ostensibly mute, is 
nonetheless increasingly mapped, measured, ordered, and predicted by new 

3 The proliferation of music scholarship in these domains is far too innumerable to list 
here. For prominent interventions in the respective fields, consider Borio et al., Investigat-
ing Musical Performance; Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding, eds., The Oxford Hand-
book of Timbre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), https://www.oxfordhandbooks.
com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190637224; Robert 
Fink, Melinda Latour and Zachary Wallmark, eds., The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre 
in Popular Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Michael Gallope, Deep 
Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190637224
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190637224


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statistical models for computing. One may speak here of the industrialized 
transmutation of music’s listening systems into reflex response systems to-
day, a subject of considerable importance in an era of industrial populism. 
In short, the turn to performance, affect, timbre, and ineffability marks a 
decisively symptomatic turn away from the material infrastructures of con-
temporary digitality—characterized by discretization, abstraction, statisti-
cal and symbolic orders, and the modeling of formal systems directly. The 
disavowal of industrialized computation, however, is generally not the tenor 
of the critique of the drastic that emerged in musicology in the past decade; 
nor is it my aim explicitly to raise this important critique in the context 
of this essay. To my way of thinking, the (often dismissive) musicological 
criticism itself had implications for scholarship that sometimes absorbed 
the weakest elements of the argument and simultaneously missed the in-
sights layered into the axioms, observations, and conclusions formulated in 
Abbate’s essay. Far from endorsing this chorus of critique, therefore, I hope 
to reveal some of the unintended consequences of thinking the drastic in 
music within Abbate’s framework, and thereby marking more prominently 
the strains of insight that nonetheless persist therein. Above all, I hope that, 
without losing its critical edge, this reflection may be regarded as genuinely 
responsive to the central challenges raised by Abbate’s riveting ideas. 

Since the publication of “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Abbate has con-
siderably expanded her theoretical ambit, engaging questions concerning 
the ephemera of silent film, the curious metaphysics of mundane sound ob-
jects, and their relation to technological mediation.4 In other words, aspects 
of the critique to follow have to some extent been addressed in these later 
writings, even as one detects a capacious consistency of argument through-
out this oeuvre. For example, while technological mediation is downplayed, 
practically be definition, in the experience of the drastic, it is acknowledged 
in these later texts—but then, crucially, also devalued. The discussion of 
ephemeral sound in “Sound Object Lessons,” for example, allows us some-
thing resembling an Archimedean point from which to break out of the 
grand tradition of technological determinism—an enchained narrative 
that “cites a device or technology and then sees its reflection in a musical 
work or technique.”5 While “Sound Object Lessons” tends to acknowledge 

4 See, for example, Abbate’s “Overlooking the Ephemeral,” New Literary History 48, no. 
1 (2017): 75–102; and “Sound Object Lessons,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 
69, no. 3 (2016): 793–829. 

5 Abbate, “Sound Object Lessons,” 794.



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the capacity of technologies to shape sound, these do not drive the startling 
“musicalizations” Abbate seeks to retrieve.6 In other words, her basic phil-
osophical position betrays a determined disinterest in non-sounding ele-
ments that may inhabit the phenomenological scene of listening. Therefore, 
while operationally present, sound technologies ultimately subtend musi-
calization. Instead of tracking the nuanced differences between Abbate’s 
recent writings—the changing calibrations of the technology/music dialec-
tic, for example—this essay explores the impulse to draw out the inherently 
sound-centered exposition of musical listening, most vividly experienced 
in the throes of live performance. Notwithstanding a certain fatigue for the 
drastic, this essay attempts to outline the limits of thinking musical perfor-
mance as drastic experience. 

Technophobic Transmissions of the Drastic 

Abbate’s opening lines again: “What does it mean to write about performed 
music? About an opera live and unfolding in time and not an operatic 
work? Shouldn’t this be what we do, since we love music for its reality, for 
voices and sounds that linger long after they are no longer there? Love is 
not based on great works as unperformed abstractions or even as subtend-
ed by an imagined or hypothetical performance.” Within the simplicity of 
a handful of inquisitive questions, we find a language that—consciously, 
perhaps—performs a kind of trick. Readers are presented less with a group 
of casually associated questions than with a questionable chain of casual 
associations. Listed as if to bear elementary likeness, we find the concepts 
of performance (“performed music”) and liveness (“live and unfolding in 
time”) set alongside music’s realness (“its reality”), its sonorous dimensions 
(“voices and sounds”) and its sonorous persistence (“linger[ing] long after 
they are no longer there”). This set of sound-centric ideas is extended in the 

6 Abbate, “Sound Object Lessons,” 797. Abbate’s resolutely sound-centered analytics are 
perhaps the most influential uptake of her work in musicological writings in the wake of 
“Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” For an excellent commentary on the turn to music as heard 
sound, for example, see Suzanne G. Cusick, “Musicology, Performativity, Acoustemology,” in 
Theorizing Sound Writing, ed. Deborah Kapchan (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 
2017), 25–45. In her analysis of the “human microphone” (which formed part of the expres-
sive resistance of the Occupy Wall Street movement), Cusick, on the one hand, draws on 
Abbate’s attention to the “physical reality of music-as-sound,” but mediates its hold on the 
listener, on the other hand, with reference to “nonmusical acoustic practice” (27, 40). 



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next three sentences to include “actual performances,” “music that exists 
in time,” “the material acoustic phenomenon,” and the like. These are the 
ideas that come to define what Abbate calls the drastic—an irreducible (yet 
largely overlooked) realm of musical experience. In contrast, we find terms 
like “unperformed abstractions,” “imagined or hypothetical performance,” 
“meanings or formal designs,” and “the abstraction of the work”—inca-
pable of confronting music’s presence; preoccupied instead by “something 
else,” something “behind or beyond or next to” the actual music—congeal-
ing into an antipodal set (505). In short, performances are set against works; 
liveness against abstraction; sonorous presence against meaning and form; 
the drastic against the gnostic.

The first, almost obligatory, point to make about these dichotomous sets 
is that some of the terms are burdened by internal contradiction. For ex-
ample, liveness is an arguably unstable idea, paradoxically constituted in 
our times. Phil Auslander argues, for example, that liveness is often consti-
tuted in dissimulatory fashion—an auratic effect both logically and prac-
tically produced in contexts of saturated technical reproduction.7 Second, 
the attempt to elide drastic experience with liveness specifies a relation-
ship between auditor and event that is, in social practice, quite constrained. 
Abbate resolutely stakes out the “material present event”—the “actual 
live performance (and not a recording, even of a live performance)”—as 
the central object of absorption and attention (506, emphasis added). On 
one occasion, if only to inoculate their evident power, musical recordings 
are faintly nudged toward the possibility of ushering drastic experience: 
“Even recordings,” Abbate writes, “as technologically constructed hyper-
performances, which we can arrest and control, are not quite safe as long 
as they are raining sound down on our heads” (512). But does the affective 
intensity to which the drastic lays claim have a more privileged relation to 
live performance—in the strict sense of the term, entailing both the spatial 
co-presence and temporal simultaneity of auditor and performer—than it 
does to modalities of reproduced sound? The idea, of course, is hotly con-
tested and in doubt. 

First, the idea is at variance with a widespread anthropological reality—
the ubiquitous affective investments in streams of recorded music no less 
than music that possess no live counterpart at all. In the context of a world 
where representational technologies have overwhelmed presentational 

7 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 
1999). 



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ones, modes of contemporary affect can be shoehorned into the specifici-
ties of strictly live encounter only under considerable strain. The dominant 
mode of musical production, marketing, and engineering today cannot be 
divorced from the technological resources—computer-imaging methods, 
beat matching, sampling, studio looping, multi-tracking, mixing, overdub-
bing, vocoding, autotuning, etc.—that underwrite its “material acoustic” 
character. If the historical raison d’ être for sound recording was mimet-
ic—a documentary impulse—its mid-century reality had shifted toward a 
constructive one. Indeed, I would describe the history of representation-
al technologies in terms of a great shift from representational fidelity (in 
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) to hyperfidelity (in the late 
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries). In the context of hyperfidelity, 
the musical copy is itself a surrogate-original (skeuomorphically called the 
master copy) while the live rendition of it is a subordinate reproduction, not 
infrequently aspiring to the condition of the official recording. This is not to 
say that figures of music’s ostensible loci will remain under the grip of this 
rubric in decades to come (especially as the financialized logics of digital 
musical streaming take increasing monopolistic hold), but that the figure 
of hyperfidelity still characterizes the dominant contemporary mode of 
musical consumption today. This leads to a second, more important, point 
concerning the role of technology in drastic musical experience. A host of 
twentieth-century composers and theorists—from Pierre Schaeffer, Roland 
Barthes, and Gilles Deleuze to Helmut Lachenmann, John Oswald, and 
Michel Chion, to name only an obvious few—turned their attention to the 
question concerning the technologies of music’s non-gnostic components. 
What generally distinguishes these arguments from that found in Abbate’s 
text is that they do not align contemporary modes of sonic presence most 
immediately with live performance, but rather with its antithesis—sound 
manipulation and reproduction. This reversal of fortune for technology is 
itself symptomatic of a paradoxical post-Cold War shift in conceptualizing 
the affective dimension of music’s ineffability.

Schaeffer’s phenomenological reduction, for example, shares with 
Abbate an effort to re-direct listening toward non-appropriated sound. In 
other words, his is an attempt to free auditory acts from the linguistically-
mediated circuits of naturalized listening. For Schaeffer, such listening 
involves what he calls écouter réduite (reduced or acousmatic) listening, 
which is distinct from ouïr (the inattentive audition associated with 
persistent soundscapes), comprendre (listening directed at the reception of 
languages and the extraction of messages), and écouter (listening directed at 



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registering indices of objects and events in the world).8 Acousmatic listening 
brackets sound from the communicative or indicative significations to 
which listening is all-too-easily enjoined, encountering sound instead as 
objets sonores. This is a kind of listening that leads “from pure ‘sound’ 
to pure ‘music,’” bringing to earshot declensions of sonorous potential—
“previously unheard sounds, new timbres, dizzying modes of playing,” and 
so on—in short, a kind of drastic “listen[ing] with a new ear” (not to be 
equated with psychoanalytic listening, about which more below).9 Despite 
an evident proximity of reduced listening to the drastic, however, Schaeffer’s 
position vis-à-vis technology is diametrically opposed to that of Abbate. For 
Schaeffer, radio, phonography, and tape are the technological incarnations 
of Pythagoras’ acousmatic ideal. Far from lamenting the losses, Schaeffer 
focuses on the perceptual affordances of new technologies, especially those 
of sound reproduction. Schaeffer’s neo-Benjaminian leanings, for example, 
lead him to construe repeat-listening as ushering “different perspectives” 
that reveal a “new aspect of the object”; indeed, repetition even has the 
effect of “exhausting th[e] curiosity” for indexical or linguistically-based 
hearing.10 For Schaeffer, in short, new technologies are the assistive vehicle 
for the anti-gnostic “acousmatic state”; not its antithesis.11 

The technocentric turn in twentieth century accounts of drastic musi-
cal experience, broadly construed, extends well beyond Schaeffer’s treatise. 
Even Barthes’ famous notion of the voice’s grain, to which Abbate’s writ-
ing owes a loose allegiance, actually echoes Schaeffer’s notion of the grain, 
which he detects in the technological context of slowed-down tape record-
ing. In Schaeffer’s view, the slowed-down portion, “acting on the tempo-
ral structure of the sound like a magnifying glass, will have allowed us to 
distinguish certain details, of grain, for example, which our ear, alerted, 
informed, will also find in the second playing at normal speed.”12 In other 
words, tape recording is the technical support mechanism for a non-her-
meneutic attentiveness to sound qua sound. The composer Lachenmann 
expanded this technical insight into a compositional procedure—musique 
concrète instrumentale—which foregrounds listening to the way “materials 
and energies” are afforded (and undermined) by specific instrumental tech-

8 Pierre Schaeffer, Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines, trans. Christine 
North and John Dack (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 64–69.

9 Schaeffer, 69.
10 Schaeffer, 66.
11 Schaeffer, 68.
12 Schaeffer, 67, emphasis added.



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nologies.13 Likewise, the film theorist Chion argues in the context of cinema 
that technical reproducibility is a necessary condition for “reduced” listen-
ing; a mode of listening that focuses on “traits of the sound itself, independ-
ent of its cause and of its meaning.”14 While Chion’s reduced listening can-
not be conflated with drastic listening, its embrace of the “inherent qualities 
of sounds” in real time, and especially its disavowal of the “sound’s cause 
or the comprehension of its meaning” is uncannily common to both.15 As it 
is with the object of drastic listening (music’s “material acoustic phenome-
non”), reduced listening also involves an aspect of wildness, ephemerality, 
and caprice: “There is always something about sound that overwhelms and 
surprises us no matter what—especially when we refuse to lend it our con-
scious attention; and thus sound interferes with our perception, affects it.”16 
In short, Chion’s nonconscious, overwhelming, affected perception is the 
technophilic twin of Abbate’s nonsignifying, unassured drastic experience. 

Finally, Deleuze and Guattari, whose two-volume Capitalism and 
Schizophrenia lay the groundwork for Brian Massumi’s theory of affect in 
the early 2000s, likewise construe affect (or “desiring-production”) as an 
abstract machine, modeled on the musical synthesizer—a technology that 
could assemble and combine sonic elements outside of a priori nomen-
clatures.17 Drawing on their reading of Pierre Boulez’s analytic writings, 
the philosophers claim that the “synthesizer places all of the parameters 
in continuous variation, gradually making ‘fundamentally heterogeneous 
elements end up turning into each other in some way.’ The moment this 
occurs there is a common matter. It is only at this point that one reaches 
the abstract machine.”18 In other words, desiring-production resists tax-
onomic organization and plugs instead into machinic assemblages: “Phi-
losophy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a thought synthesizer 
functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the 
Cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound travel).”19 These composers 

13 Helmut Lachenmann, “Musique Concrète Instrumentale,” Slought, conversation with 
Gene Coleman, April 7, 2008, https://slought.org/resources/musique_concrete_instrumentale.

14 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New 
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 29.

15 Chion, 31, 30.
16 Chion, 33.
17 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: 

Duke University Press, 2002).
18 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 

trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 109.
19 Deleuze and Guattari, 343.



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and philosophers of techno-presence amass new sound technologies—
ranging from phonography, radio, tape, and telephone to musical instru-
ments, auditory projection in cinema, and the sound synthesizer—as re-
sistive forces to guard against our naturalized tendencies toward gnostic 
(indexical, formal, hermeneutic, etc.) musical engagement. For Abbate, 
in contrast, technology itself is largely to be resisted; indeed, “the very 
fact of recording” comes into presence only as a “repeatable surrogate” 
(534). Like musical works, recordings transform the event into a “souve-
nir” (513); an “artifact, handheld and under control” (534). Placed along-
side the work of Schaeffer, Barthes, Lachenmann, Chion, Deleuze and 
Guattari, and others, Abbate’s construal of the drastic becomes a striking 
outlier. Ostensibly caught up in the wild ephemerality of its “temporal 
wake” (511), we now find the drastic experience itself subject to the kind 
of “arrest and control” (however differently inflected) associated with the 
“hyperperformances” that Abbate rejects (512). In short, for Abbate, dras-
tic listening can be secreted only within the confines of a single conduit 
for music’s mediatic transmission—the live event.

Of Auditory Relocations: Lingering or Loitering? 

But what of the chain of associations that characterizes the drastic audi-
tory experience? What of the litany of terms accruing to it—performance 
(505), presence (512), strangeness (508), liveness (509), sonorousness (505), 
actuality (509), temporality (511), reality (505), materiality (510), acoustic 
phenomenality (505), physicality (510), ephemerality (513), opacity (510), 
capacity (to transfix, bewilder, etc.) (512), ineffability (521), sociality (514), 
carnality (529), and so on? What do we make of this capacious ballooning 
of characteristics within the narrowing contexts of music’s transmission? 
By what desire is more packed here into less? And by what inscription does 
drastic listening have the capacity to affect everything from love (505), fear 
(508), consolation (508) and peril (510) to wildness (512), desperation (510), 
exhaustion (533) and elation (533)? It is true that the expansive list of dras-
tic attributes is occasionally moderated with reference to music’s patently 
banal dimensions. In fact, we find in the text two references to the drastic 
mundane. First, Abbate’s momentary reflection on a piano accompani-
ment—“doing this really fast is fun or here comes a big jump” (511)—counts 
as an experience closer to the music’s “reality at hand” than the “bizarre” 
mental inquiries (511, 510)—the music’s “Enlightenment subjectivity” (510), 



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for example, or the political order it reflects—that are associated with gnos-
tic inquiry. Second, we find a brief reference to music’s potentially “bor-
ing” effect on performers and listeners (513). Some fast fun, a big jump—the 
quotidian, if drastic, experiences of a piano performance—and something 
boring—the uneventful, if drastic, experience of an event—basically sums 
up the dull side of the drastic, as it is represented in Abbate’s text. For the 
most part, however, the drastic carries an exciting Dionysian luster—it is 
unearthly (508), wild (509) and mysterious (513). Even the reference to bore-
dom is abbreviated in its fuller argumentative context—a solitary adjective 
in a long list of alluring effects, characterized by semantically unhinged 
intensities. Here is the full sentence: “Music’s effects upon performers and 
listeners can be devastating, physically brutal, mysterious, erotic, moving, 
boring, pleasing, enervating, or uncomfortable, generally embarrassing, 
subjective, and resistant to the gnostic” (513–514). In short, therefore, the 
drastic liberates the wildness of musical experience; while, against odds, 
the beleaguered gnostic tries to tame it—the gnostic tries “to domesticate 
what remains nonetheless wild” (508). 

What remains wild? What remains at all? I phrase these questions this 
way, because in Abbate’s text, one answer to them can be detected in the 
space that opens in the immediate aftermath of our encounter with music. 
Abbate repeatedly explores variations within these spaces of auditory 
relocation. In fact, therein lie the stakes of the expansive list of Dionysian 
attributes of the drastic. Let me explain. The uneasy affiliation of unlike 
terms in the list characterizing drastic experience is partnered with the 
uneasy non-affiliation of like terms accruing to both drastic and gnostic 
experience. On the one hand, for example, we are told we “love music for 
its reality”—specifically for those voices and sounds that “linger long after” 
they abate (505, emphasis added). On the other hand, Abbate simultaneously 
insists that “real music is music that exists in time, the material acoustic 
phenomenon” alone (505); an experience “not enduring past the moment” 
(512, emphasis added). A few pages later the point is intensified when Abbate 
strikes a vivid contrast between music’s vanishing temporality and its ex 
post facto interpretation: “In musical hermeneutics, … effects in the here 
and now are illicitly relocated to the beyond” (514, emphasis added). Here, 
the attribute attendant to the hermeneutic act of relocating listening away 
from the here and now raises considerably the ethical stakes with which the 
essay began its polemic. 

The essay’s opening gambit about the limits of hermeneutics and for-
malism cohere largely around the principle of withdrawal. Drawing on 



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Vladimir Jankélévitch’s writings,20 Abbate here argues that these musical 
engagements “encourage us to retreat from real music to the abstraction 
of the work and, furthermore, always to see … ‘something else,’ something 
behind or beyond or next to this mental object” (505, emphasis added). This 
is the kind of displacement (or relocation) emerging from a mode of re-
fusal—the retreat from real music. The point is reiterated throughout the 
essay. For example, elsewhere Abbate writes: “Between the score as a script, 
the musical work as a virtual construct, and us, there lies a huge phenome-
nal explosion, a performance that demands effort and expense and recruits 
human participants, takes up time, and leaves people drained or tired or 
elated or relieved” (533). In other words, the refusal to put in the effort, pay 
the expense, take up the time, and so on, amounts to a kind of retreat from 
the present reality of musical performances. Indeed, withdrawals such as 
these “lack that really big middle term, the elephant in the room,” which, 
summed up in the next sentence, amounts to “music’s exceptional phenom-
enal existence” (533). The point is that these acts of refusal and retreat are 
then amplified, by assertion alone, to constitute something forbidden, as if 
to be laundering meanings from murky origins. In less than ten pages, for 
example, we witness a retreat from something morphing into an illicit relo-
cation therefrom—a metamorphosis that constitutes a particular rhetorical 
relocation all of its own (521). 

The fascinating thing about relocating the musical experience in the her-
meneutic/formalist manner, however, is that it blocks a kind of affective 
becoming that, for Abbate, remains central to musical experience. Again, 
the logic of refusal underwrites this point. She writes: “Retreating to the 
work displaces that experience, and dissecting the work’s technical features 
or saying what it represents reflects the wish not to be transported by the 
state that the performance has engendered in us” (505–506). Here, a mode 
of gnostic repression obstructs a drastic experience—to be transported by 
sound—paradoxically wholly in keeping with romantic theories of music 
as processual becoming, the transfiguration of the commonplace, and so 
on. But, aside from archaic resonances, whence the overwhelming drastic 
transport? To wit, whence the long lingering in sonorities that are no longer 
there? What kinds of relocations are these—the transport, the lingering—
that immunize them from their illicit fellow travelers? It appears that—in 
the wake of the vanishing presence of music’s phenomenal existence, its ef-

20 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: 
Princeton University Press, 2003).



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fects in the “here and now” and no further or later—certain types of reloca-
tions are permitted, after all (514, emphasis added). But these are the move-
ments of a policed relocation—movements along a particular, constrained 
path, steered precariously away from anything conceivably construed, in 
Jankélévitch’s formulation, as “something else” (505). In other words, this 
is the “transport” that steers clear of the Scylla and Charybdis of anything 
that can be conceived as lying “behind or beyond or next to this mental 
object” (505). What to make of this mental object—this entity from whence 
music’s reality lovingly issues forth; from whence audibility receives a wink 
of recognition from unsullied phenomenal existence itself? Is this the entity 
one is paradoxically compelled to describe as a dogmatic presentiment of 
real music’s mysterious a priori?

Lingering in the quiet wake of music’s drastic sounding thereby consti-
tutes a mode of supra-audibility that breaks through the conventional bar-
rier associated with the drastic event—fully respectful of music’s essential 
“disappear[ing]” act (513); “not enduring past the moment” (512); the “van-
ished live performances” (514) and so on. As it is with the implied wish 
to be transported, this lingering-type of engagement is the privileged su-
pra-audible truth that paradoxically transcends the supra-audible “mean-
ings” (509) “content” (516) “import” (518) “message” (521) and “social truth” 
(526) to which the ear seems all-too-gnostically enjoined. The latter con-
tents and messages and truths are illicitly secreted out of enigma machines, 
cryptograms, seismographs, and so on (524–529), in a process that is broadly 
summed up as “clandestine mysticism” (513–534). As it is with money laun-
dering, these accounts arrogate contents and messages and truths by hiding 
their obscure origins and routing them through all manner of supra-audi-
ble theoretical machinery—historical, formal, linguistic, social, economic 
and political. In other words, the hermeneutic and formalist “inscription 
devices” (514) and “enigma machine[s]” (524) are the illicit middlemen 
laundering meaning from musical sound—a process that works “as if by 
magic” (528). Drastic engagement, in contrast, requires a radical de-signi-
fying step, a shedding of devices and machines. Following a long tradition 
of thinking sound outside of theory, Abbate argues that, with the drastic, 
“there is no a priori theoretical armor” (510). This is a version of the drastic, 
in short, that is construed as supra-supra-audible. 

How, then, does one tie up Abbate’s central reflections on the question 
concerning retrospective concern for musical experience? What persists be-
yond music’s definitional circumspection (or what I have described above as 
the real music’s mysterious a priori)? The answer is shoehorned into some 



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version of the following formulation: the content of drastic transport and 
lingering must relocate listening licitly toward the absence of theoretical ar-
mor. Ce n’est pas un a priori. Licit relocation, in other words, takes the listen-
er not next to, but simply to the elephant in the room; not to the mysticism 
of gnostic decipherment, but to the non-conceptual drastic music qua music. 
To be transported by music, in short, is to be taken not beyond, but to with-
in music’s conceptual no-place—u-topia. Spending-time in the wake of the 
vanishing live, in short, comes in two distinct forms: lingering and loitering. 
A maelstrom of questions arises at this juncture. First: When—in the wake 
of music’s vanishing present—we stick around longer than music’s actual 
sounding, are we experiencing a form of drastically (utopian) lingering or 
a form of gnostically (laundered) loitering? Second: Given the fact that a 
certain persistence in the vanishing present is common to both lingering and 
loitering, can the ontological inscription of music’s ephemerality alone se-
cure an argument that elevates the drastic experience, by casting Schopen-
hauerian shadows on the gnostic version of things? Third: Would such an 
argument both arrogate the powers of radical vanishing and disappearance 
in the context of emergence and appearance, and, furthermore—through 
its clandestine withholding in the context of the gnostic—asymmetrically 
so? Finally: What can happen if, instead of listening within the horns of an 
asymmetric dilemma, we return musical experience to the crossroads of the 
drastic and the gnostic, if only to ponder the road not taken? 

The Privileged Audility of Performance

The gnostic seems to leave out the undomestic, untamed aspects of musical 
experience—its irreducible aural presence; its material sensual dimensions 
(triggering fear, peril, and much more) which leave listeners with no hand-
hold in signification. James Currie would, in a well-known essay written a 
few years later, describe music’s beriddling specificity as “the blank trans-
formative hole” into which we fall in the moment of musical encounter.21 
The drastic, in contrast, is characterized by examples of uncanny resem-
blances, experiential alchemies, cracked notes, hallucinations, and so on 
(more on these below). Given that the gnostic attitude is “precluded” there-
by, the drastic resides, above all, in performed music (Abbate, 510). In other 

21 James Currie, “Music After All,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62, no.1 
(2009): 184.



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words, it is at the site of performance that drastic experience is most vividly 
at play: “It is virtually impossible to sustain [gnostic speculations about 
subjectivity or politics] while playing or absorbed in listening to music that 
is materially present” (510). How do the examples of performance function 
as demonstrations of the drastic? Abbate reflects on an occasion where she 
accompanies an aria from Mozart’s Idomeneo. As an experiment, she poses 
some distracting questions, while playing, grounded in speculations she 
had read about the monarchic regime and the Enlightenment subjectivity 
said to be reflected in the music. She concludes that, interjected in media 
perficientur, these “consciously bizarre” mental inquiries could, finally, 
only be “dismissed as ludicrous” (510, 511).

Interestingly, while vividly upholding the difference between drastic 
and gnostic, Abbate loosens the distinction between actual playing and 
absorbed listening in the over-arching context of performance, where one 
is undoubtedly “dealing with real music in real time” (511). This is the priv-
ileged site of audility—“the reality at hand”—which, practically by defini-
tion, sabotages the “metaphysical distance” required for gnostic arguments 
about politics, subjectivity, or any other modes of meaning-making or sig-
nification (511). Abbate expands the argument against gnostic approaches 
to musical works by appealing to their affective value as well. In the throes 
of “real music in real time,” she writes, gnostic engagement is both “almost 
impossible” and “generally uninteresting” (511). A simple, practical fact 
hereby evolves into a judgment of value. To “depart mentally” (511) from 
music’s reality at hand is both not practical and largely less interesting. 
Aside from the fact of its impracticality, why is the gnostic construed as 
less interesting at this point in the argument? The answer lies in the wild 
affective intensities associated with the drastic, and the narrowing affec-
tive reach of the gnostic: “Listening as a phenomenon takes place under 
music’s thumb, and acoustic presence may transfix or bewilder; it frees the 
listener from the sanctioned neatness of the hermeneutic” (512). The dras-
tic is liberating, in other words—it heralds states of wonder, astonishment, 
mystery, confusion and awe—and the gnostic is confining—it is neat and 
sanctioned (512) instead of wild and mysterious (513); it locks down mean-
ing instead of leaving it open; it is a safer haven (512), instead of free (516) 
and exceptional (533) in its phenomenal existence; it traffics in abstractions 
under the aspect of eternity (512) instead of engaging the labor and carnal-
ity (514) of music’s vanishing liveness. 

The striking point about formalist and hermeneutic approaches, then, is 
not only that they have “little to do with real music” (512), but rather that 



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they foreclose the wildness and mystery, the open-endedness and the free-
dom; the labor and the carnality of drastic experience. The alluring pow-
er of the drastic is such that it can traverse all manner of affect, at once 
ephemeral—bewildered, mysterious, fallen into silence, etc.—and embod-
ied—physically brutal, erotic, carnal, etc. (510–513). The gnostic, in contrast, 
is atemporal and disembodied; punitive even—it repays “the freedom” of 
the drastic by trapping the “gift-giver in a cage” (517). None of these attrib-
utes of the drastic are objectionable as such, but their antithetical relation 
to hermeneutic and formal engagements, on the one hand, and musical 
performance, on the other, can be sustained only with difficulty. In fact, 
not infrequently, Abbate’s text must bend curious and complex phenomena 
to the scriptural pattern of a dichotomous theoretical mold. For example, 
the assertion that homosexual subjectivity is somehow reflected in what 
Susan McClary calls the “enharmonic and oblique modulations” of musical 
sound can hardly be described as a gnostic attempt to “domesticate” drastic 
wildness (508, 510–511).22 In fact, Abbate’s rhetorical maneuver gains trac-
tion here precisely from the seeming absurdity of McClary’s statement—its 
risky wildness, its weirdness—made palpable in the paradoxical context of 
a banal performance (512). What we detect here is a drastic encounter un-
wittingly domesticated under the guidance of an instruction (“here comes a 
big jump,” 511), while the gnostic engagement escalates its claims (“narrative 
structures” of “gay writers and critics,” 511), well beyond the logic and grasp 
of its a priori instructional apparatus. Abbate’s doubts about McClary’s 
claims, at this argumentative juncture, have less to do with domesticating 
the drastic—the prison of sanctioned neatness; the entrapment of a gift-giv-
er; and so on—and more to do with the unruly over-reach of their interpre-
tive freedom—their illicit wildness.

This is not simply to reactively endorse the validity of McClary’s claims 
without scrutiny, but to demonstrate the way attributing privileged audil-
ity to performance creates the conditions for the undermining of Abbate’s 
general argument. Abbate claims that “during the experience of real mu-
sic”—or, more precisely, in the context of actually “playing” it—“thoughts 
about what music signifies or about its formal features do not cross [her] 
mind” (511). Gnostic considerations such as these appear as if in “the wrong 
moment,” departed from the “reality at hand” (511). This reality, however, is 

22 The reference is to Susan McClary, “Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music,” 
in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood 
and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 223.



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highly unstable, for it encompasses both the quotidian scan for directives 
from the score (or its mnemonic supplement)—“doing this really fast;” the 
“big jump” to come; etc.—and, by the next paragraph, the wildness of an 
“acoustic presence” that can “transfix or bewilder” (512). This juxtaposi-
tion of terms associated with the drastic serves to sharpen a distinction 
between, on the one hand, performing music and, on the other, listening to 
it (while not performing); a distinction that has been clandestinely elided 
here. Are wholly different attentional regimes blended here in service of the 
drastic? How bewildered, for example, or how transfixed (or fearful, desper-
ate, erotically aroused, uncomfortable, and so on) can one actually afford 
to be by the sounding passage under one’s musically-performing hands? 
The specificity of performance—its reality at hand—in fact demands that 
such wild affective intensities are kept at arms’ length. The successful exe-
cution of the big jump to come actually requires a narrowing of attention 
towards the physical task at hand and away from the allure of such drastic 
drift. To posit performance as the site of a privileged engagement with the 
drastic (in the full range and sense of the term) is paradoxically to simplify 
the complex audilities at play in any actual performance. There is, in other 
words, a strange dance between close listening and un-listening (engaging 
and suppressing real-time evaluations, alertness, affects, etc.) that charac-
terizes actual musical performances and cannot be simply collated—under 
the paradoxical rubric of freedom (517), wildness (508–509) and openness 
(516)—to the drastic.

For Abbate, “while one is caught up in its temporal wake and its physical 
demands or effects,” the performer (at least in the context of live perfor-
mance) cannot readily “depart mentally” from actual music (511). But from 
what event, precisely, can the performer not depart? By what inscription is 
the performer enjoined to remain? Again, what exactly remains? Does the 
idea of the work play no part in this remaining? What of the precarious 
devastation (513) and dread associated with the departures (511) pertaining 
to mismanaged performances? Why are they dreadful and how is the dread 
overcome? What remaining features guide the dread and its overcoming? 
Do all the “ formal features” associated with this site of remaining, for ex-
ample, depart from the performer’s audility—to the extent that they do not 
even “cross [her] mind” (511)? How is derailment from the musical event at 
hand circumvented, if not by way of an appeal to at least some of these for-
mal features some of the time—a specific affective rubric (bravura, say), or a 
guiding harmonic scheme, to offer an avenue out of a series of missed notes; 
or an internalized feel for specific metric coordinates, or a set of gestural 



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rhythmic conventions, to offer an avenue out of a missed page turn, and 
the like? And what sense of “real music in real time” prohibits every audile 
departure (511)? What if sustaining the temporality of a distinct motor pat-
tern entails ignoring the inherent pattern emerging from an interlocking 
situation? What if driving the melodic line towards an oblique modulation 
entails the momentary suppression of presently unfolding heterophonic 
details? What if the momentary cracking of the singer’s voice that one is 
accompanying must be suppressed in order successfully to execute a big 
leap that is lying in wait (beyond the moment of cracking)? Are these not 
the necessary aspects of un-listening required for the proper functioning 
of both solo and ensemble work? Indeed, are these not the small “reflective 
distance[s] or safer haven[s] from the presence of musical sound” (unilater-
ally associated by Abbate with the gnostic) that are, in fact, the conditions 
for the possibility of music’s “proper object” (512, 513)?

The point is that gnostic knowledge is not the only knowledge that takes 
temporary leave of music’s “proper object”—construed as its “ephemeral 
phenomenal being” alone (513). It is true that drastic and gnostic engagements 
differently mediate their comings-and-goings from actual performed music 
but neither can be immanently construed as either departed or remained; 
either relocated or located. The distinction between the drastic and gnostic 
cannot be sustained at this level of generality. Abbate argues, in contrast, 
that the gnostic approach alone has “misplaced its proper object,” no less 
so when it treats performance as an “object awaiting decipherment” or as a 
“text subject to some analytical method yet to come” (513). Abbate writes: 
“To treat them this way would be to transfer the professional deformations 
proper to hermeneutics to a phenomenon or event where those habits 
become alien and perhaps useless” (513). Acts of decipherment and analysis, 
in other words, are habituated professional gestures that turn a deaf ear 
to performance—indeed, performance “is inaudible to both in practice” 
(513)—thereby relocating their findings to an irreducible outside, and hence 
without use. What do we make of this professional site of habituation, 
not infrequently associated with elitism (510, 516) in Abbate’s text—and 
its peculiar uselessness (513)? For Abbate, this elite site (for “privileged 
eyes only,” 528) is the clandestine mysticism deeply abstracted from 
actual performance, conceived (at this point of the argument) within the 
contours of an informal, but constitutive, Gebrauchs-context. But, outside 
the logic and grasp of these elite habits, what exactly is properly useful 
to this musical reality at hand? In other words, what are the performers’ 
listening techniques, body habits, and trained reflexes that lie in wait for 



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the task at hand? We might frame the question thus: Are these habits not 
ready to hand (zuhanden, to invoke Martin Heidegger’s formulation of such 
matters) for the performance’s reality at hand? If the drastic resides but in 
the flux and flow of actual performance, are its freedoms not endangered 
by the force of these useful habits? Is the interface between the musical 
instrument and the human body not a fertile training ground for embodied 
comportment? Are these behaviors not brought under the direction of both 
the instrument’s technical designs and (in the case of traditional European 
concert music at least) a host of additional mediatic inscription practices? 
Abbate briefly acknowledges the performer’s “servitude, even automatism” 
(presumably to notational prescriptions) early in the argument (508), but, 
for the most part, the drastic is characterized by the Dionysian attributes 
(ineffability, ephemerality, desperation, peril, and so on) already amply 
listed above. If performance were taken more seriously than it is in Abbate’s 
text, one would necessarily encounter, in a not insignificant sense, entirely 
new mediations of body and affect. If this were the case, in other words, 
one would be compelled to characterize the drastic component of music 
in paradoxically antithetical terms: the drastic now as conformism to 
prescribed codes of technical conduct; as yielding to the regulatory forces 
that govern the mastery of a skill set; as cultivating the automation of a host 
of physical human actions, and the like. In short, in the performing body 
we bear witness not to wildness, mystery, openness, and subjectivity, but—
at least in equal measure—to cultivation, repetition, discipline, technique, 
and interpellation. In short, what is useful to music’s reality at hand is a site 
par excellence of what could be called coiled-up dressage. The true drastic 
performance is noteworthy here not so much for its uncanny wildness and 
magic—its “strangeness” and “unearthly … qualities” (508)—but for its 
internalized familiarity, its disciplined domesticity? One is reminded of the 
parade of unremarkable stock gestures accompanying so much music and 
operatic performance.23 Dare one be nudged even further here, and speak 
of the privileged audility of the performative formula, the commonplace, 
the cliché? 

23 Mary Ann Smart, “The Manufacture of Extravagant Gesture: Labour and Emotion on 
the Operatic Stage,” (presentation for the seminar Investigating Musical Performance: Towards 
a Conjunction of Ethnographic and Historiographic Perspectives, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 
Venice, July 9, 2016). See also Smart’s Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century 
Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).



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On the Ethics of Abstinence

It is not without ambiguity that Abbate suggests that due deference to the 
drastic may entail silence. On the one hand, she seeks to expand the limits of 
“remain[ing] mute” (513) in the experience of musical performance, while on 
the other hand, she resists the “loquacity” of music scholarship—a “profes-
sional deformation”—suggesting that, in the final analysis, this “might even 
mean falling silent” (510). Mostly, however, the essay is a critical story about 
the gnostic arrogation of meanings and forms beyond its remit. Hermeneu-
tics and formalism summon authority by way of clandestine mysticism, an 
institutionally-sanctioned proffering of “messages,” “cultural facts,” “associa-
tions” and “constructed objects” across the terrain of music’s sounding (517). 
Abbate, in contrast, calls for reticence, abeyance, abstinence (“leaving open or 
withdrawing,” 516), resisting the rush to meaning. Given music’s subsistence 
in a state of “unresolved and subservient alterity” (524) it is frequently “used 
or exploited” to commercial ends, a temptation that responsible scholarship 
should resist (517). Following Jankélévitch, music’s very capacity for unleash-
ing “potential meanings in high multiples” is therefore linked to an ethics of 
restraint; it is music’s “ineffability” and “mutability” that ultimately “frees us” 
(516). This is the freedom that should not be repaid by ensnaring the gift-giver 
in the cage of gnostic coercion. Instead of “taking advantage of ” music—by 
pinning to it a determinate meaning or form—Abbate advances “hesitating 
before articulating a terminus,” and “perhaps, drawing back” (517). We read 
repeatedly of the appropriate ethical stance toward music—characterized 
by “grace, humility, reticence,” and so on (529). In fact, the closing lesson of 
the essay elevates such withdrawal to a kind of principle, grounded in the 
acknowledgment that “our own labor is ephemeral as well and will not en-
dure” (536). Resisting the temptation to lay bare a “cryptic truth” concealed 
in the performance, and “accepting its mortality” instead, she writes, may 
itself amount to a “form of wisdom” (536). Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, 
darüber muss man schweigen.24

What is fascinating about this kind of ethics of hesitation and humility, 
as it is described by Abbate, is the way a gesture of abstaining—from coer-
cion (535), authoritative conjuring (522), taking advantage (517), and so on—
produces an ethical position that is as simple and eloquent as it is complex 
and incoherent. First, the simple of act of withdrawal recapitulates a kind 

24 “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tracta-
tus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 108.



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of postmodern hesitation in the experience of impossibility/undecidability. 
This is a curious return to a quasi-deconstructive emphasis on troubling 
the certainty of embedded significations, placing prevalent concept-met-
aphors under erasure, and so on. In fact, Abbate regards postmodernism 
as soft hermeneutics—with “trickle-downs from skepticism”—substituting 
notions like “embedded or encoded” meaning for “trace or mark” of mean-
ing (516). Despite the softening of the metaphoric attribution of meaning, 
both, she argues, read cultural data as inscription. In other words, decon-
struction is read here as a kind of cloaked gnostic operation. Abbate also 
dismisses the deconstructive approach directly, associating it with mascu-
linity, and by extension, with a differently formulated coercion that denies 
materiality and presence. She writes: 

Adopting a deconstructive apparatus and scoffing at presence like a man can 
truly seem perverse when real music is at issue. Unlike another aural phe-
nomena [sic]—language or literature in oral form—real music does not pro-
pose a “simultaneity of sound and sense” that in thus positing a signifier and 
signified can itself be “convincingly deconstruct[ed].” Real music is a tempo-
ral event with material presence that can be held by no hand.25 

To buttress her anti-deconstructive claims, Abbate recruits Gumbrecht’s 
philosophical turn to presence. Against the “metaphysical” project asso-
ciated with the “insights of Saussurean linguistics” (531), she advocates a 
discourse of “movement, immediacy, and violence” associated with events 
“born to presence.”26 Meaning culture, she argues, is above all anathema to 
the presence of performed music.

Given Gumbrecht’s argumentative centrality at this juncture, it is 
instructive to compare the ethics of his position with those of Abbate. 
Gumbrecht too takes great interest in the materiality of musical 
experience—“I can hear the tones of the oboe on my skin,” he asserts in 
the context of an example of the production of presence—but his ethics are 
in stark contrast to the reticence advocated by Abbate.27 In Gumbrecht’s 

25 Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” 531. The quotations are from Henry M. Sayre, 
The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: The University 
of Chicago Press, 1989), 15.

26 The last two quotes, cited by Abbate, are from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Form without 
Matter vs. Form as Event,” MLN 111, no. 3 (1996): 586–587.

27 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 97.



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universe, there simply are no ethics to be found in moments of presence, 
deixis, or epiphany. He writes: “There is nothing edifying in such moments, 
no message, nothing that we could really learn from them,” which is 
why he refers to them as no more than “moments of intensity.”28 These 
moments depart from all scripting (“there is no reliable, no guaranteed 
way of producing moments of intensity”);29 they simply veer away from the 
taxonomies of signification, including ethical ones. In sum, there is simply 
no “convergence between aesthetic experience and ethical norms.”30 Not 
only is presence empty of ethical content or significance, for Gumbrecht, 
but—in stark contrast to the invitation to reticence or withdrawal—
presence is actually perceived as a kind of brutal assault. Indeed, the 
reason we should be drawn to presence at all, given its lack of edification, 
ethics, or meaning, is, for Gumbrecht, something of an enigma: “How is 
it possible that we long for such moments of intensity although they have 
no edifying contents or effects to offer?”31 For Gumbrecht, the fascination 
lies in the fact that they transcend the everyday—which is so “insuperably 
consciousness-centered … and perhaps even mediated by clouds and 
cushions of meaning.”32 It is this insight that leads Gumbrecht to link 
moments of intensity and presence to power and violence—the violence 
of “blocking spaces with bodies”—which turns out to be “irresistibly 
fascinating for us.”33 For Abbate, the gnostic impulse is the brutal play of 
authority—“taking advantage” of music’s indeterminacy, arrogating and 
foreclosing the drastic, and so on—but for Gumbrecht, to momentarily 
transpose the dichotomous terms, it is in fact the drastic that arrogates 
and forecloses all remnants of the gnostic. It is presence that overwhelms 
us—“occupying and thus blocking our bodies”—producing a kind of 
drastic fascination with “losing control over oneself.”34 Gumbrecht’s is a 
story of the assault of presence, not the assault on presence. Finally, in a 
neo-Schopenhauerian twist, Gumbrecht actually describes the material 
assault of presence in terms that resist even a residual sense of reticence 
toward the gnostic impulse—the wisdom of the momentary or the ethics 
of withdrawal. For Gumbrecht, instead, presence ultimately signals our 

28 Gumbrecht, 98.
29 Gumbrecht, 99.
30 Gumbrecht, 115.
31 Gumbrecht, 99.
32 Gumbrecht, 106.
33 Gumbrecht, 114, 115.
34 Gumbrecht, 115, 116.



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desire for integration into the world of things; our desire to yield to an 
existential longing for “pre-conceptual thingness.”35 

Given Abbate’s recruitment of Gumbrecht to oust the masculinist impulse 
of deconstruction, it is perplexing to ponder the extreme difference in their 
respective ethical stances. Again, for Gumbrecht, the intensity of presence 
is violent and agnostic of all ethics, while for Abbate the drastic is open-
ended and grounds an ethics of humility and grace. Gumbrecht’s position 
is consistent with his rejection of the linguistic turn in the Humanities, 
while, confusingly, Abbate’s position resonates with the very deconstructive 
paradigm it seeks to avert. Symptomatically, we therefore witness an uneasy 
account of the role of so-called non-conscious embodiments in Abbate’s 
text. For Gumbrecht, the assaultive character of presence lies outside of 
all conscious intention. For Abbate, the matter is more complicated. Here 
we read that a scholarly appeal to non-conscious responses is a form of 
“clandestine mysticism” (517), attendant to a kind of romantic gnostic 
chicanery. Taruskin’s assertion, for example, that composers respond 
to circumstances “below the threshold of their conscious intending” is 
denounced as “Freudian romanticism,” in which political circumstances are 
mystically said to “speak directly through the unconscious to the musical 
imagination” (520).36 Abbate allies this maneuver with a “rich history” 
that associates music with the unconscious, and the unconscious, in turn, 
with “occulted truth” (520, emphasis added). Addressing the workings of 
clandestine mysticism directly, Abbate detects how references to cryptic, 
non-conscious, oblique, hidden and secretive contents and meanings assist 
in paradoxically leveraging objectivist authority. She writes: 

There are the distinct verbal signatures produced by clandestine mysticism—
music reveals things “below … conscious intending,” “deeply hidden things,” 
“secrets,” “genuine social knowledge.” Words like code and cryptogram and 
decipher usher this chthonic discourse into broad daylight because hiero-
glyphs are at once material objects visible to the naked eye and the enigma 
these objects promise so persuasively as a hidden secret beyond their surface.37 

35 Gumbrecht, 118.
36 Abbate is quoting from Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and 

Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), xxxi.
37 Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” 526. The quotations are from Taruskin, Defining 

Russia Musically, xxxi; Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. 
B. Ashton (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976), 62; Elizabeth Wood, “Lesbian Fugue: Ethel 
Smyth’s Contrapuntal Arts,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music 



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In other words, in a context where laundering meanings, forms, and con-
tents functions as a cipher of a buried truth, the appeal to non-conscious 
operations stands as a useful alibi. 

The problem with this formulation is not only that it contradicts the di-
mension of Gumbrecht’s argument upon which Abbate relies, but that it 
also contradicts itself. Music’s immediate aural presence is paradoxically 
construed as both event and ephemeron. On the one hand, its vanishing 
act—characterized as “not enduring past the moment” (512), “ephemeral 
phenomenal being” (513), “perpetually absent object” (514), “subject to in-
stantaneous loss” (532), etc.—assures its fundamental resistance to gnostic 
over-reach. In other words, the atemporal character of gnostic investiga-
tion—“under the aspect of eternity” (512)—such as we find in formalism 
and hermeneutics is, practically by definition, a categorical distortion of 
music’s reality—a kind of “professional deformation” (510) or “illicit re-
location” (521) to a fixed space outside the flow of time. It is this aspect 
of music’s ontological status—its ephemerality—to which Abbate’s ethics 
most prominently respond. On the other hand, music’s irreducible pres-
ence—characterized as “physical force and sensual power” (509), “material 
presence and carnality” (529), “the event itself ” (532), “exceptional phenom-
enal existence” (533), etc.—assures its voluminous being-there for arresting 
embodiment. In other words, music’s almost ballistic materiality, in stark 
contrast to its ephemerality, endows it with the physical force of an external 
object.38 With this information about music’s ontological status in mind—
its event-ness—Abbate’s ethics take an interesting turn. Far from being an-
nexed by acts of gnostic arrogation, immediate aural presence now annexes 
the receptive body and even alters its state. In an act of drastic arrogation 
(momentarily in sync with Gumbrecht’s conception of presence), it now 
“acts upon us and changes us” (532).

What is troubling about this reversal of fortune for ethics as it is weighed 
upon by the event (instead of released by the ephemeron), is that it indulges, 
fleetingly but tellingly, the very clandestine mysticism once associated with 
the cryptographic sublime. Let me explain. Non-conscious sonorous ob-
jects now promise embodiments that are as much a “hidden secret beyond 
their surface” (526) as any gnostic seismograph (528). In other words, pres-

Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 164–183: 164; 
Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of 
California Press, 2000), 5.

38 Currie’s gravitational metaphor of falling into a transformative gap is relevant here 
(Currie, “Music After All,” 184).



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ence effects, like their gnostic arrogations, are “tandem flights” (531) toward 
a threshold below conscious intending (520): “When it is present, [music] can 
ban logos or move our bodies,” she writes, before adding “without our con-
scious will” (532, emphasis added). But whence this drastic unconscious? 
It is not only that drastic encounter now shares with gnostic interpreta-
tion the “Freudian romanticism” Abbate hopes to reject (520), but that this 
very mode of romanticism secures the principal ethical import of Abbate’s 
position. How so? On close inspection, the simple ethics of withdrawal de-
scribed above metamorphose, as Abbate’s argument unfolds, into some-
thing new—an ethics of incorporation. Far from mere schweigen (falling 
silent, leaving open, etc.) the ethics of the drastic in its material and carnal 
moment introduce a moral confrontation with alterity. The gnostic now 
forecloses the value of the quasi-ballistic force of the drastic—the “value,” 
that is, “both intellectually and morally, in encountering a present other at 
point-blank range” (532, emphasis added). This encounter with a present 
other expands into an ethics of the other that is given voice throughout the 
essay. Recall, for example, the gnostic enjoinment to “articulat[e] a termi-
nus, or [restrict] music to any determinate meaning within any declara-
tive sentence” (517), to which Abbate responds with an appeal to freedom. 
The appropriate engagement with this encounter involves “not taking ad-
vantage,” “hesitating,” and “drawing back” from the (gift-giving) musical 
configuration (517). Anthropomorphism aside, Abbate argues, this kind of 
abstinence resembles “an ethical position” (517). Musical works are not liv-
ing things, “but the way we cope with them may reflect choices about how 
to cope with real human others or how not to” (517). 

The point is that this ethical position recapitulates the clandestine mys-
ticism of gnostic interpretation, which too operates on the logic of resem-
blance, reflection, and revelation. Gnostic arrogation occurs when some 
configuration detected in beautiful sounds—an oblique enharmonic mod-
ulation, say—is said to resemble or reflect something alien to it—a certain 
subjectivity or political regime or so. By what inscription may the reticent 
attitude, hesitating before the call of (narcissistic?) gnostic reflection, come 
suddenly to reflect forms of social interaction (with real human others) af-
ter all (517)? By what clandestine metamorphosis did abstinence become a 
seismographic reflection of socially-mediated ethical encounter? Or does 
the encounter with real human others at stake here operate more by way 
of non-reflective immediacy—at point-blank range, and so on? It is unclear. 
But perhaps this counter-point is overdrawn, for the reference to affirm-
ative ethics in both cases quickly recedes as the essay resumes the task of 



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raining down critique on the head of gnostic mysticism. Toward the end of 
the argument, however, Abbate actually ups the ante on this construal of 
ethics by spiritualizing the physicality of music in performance. Following 
Jankélévitch, she claims that music’s “physical action can engender spiritual 
conditions, grace, humility, reticence” (529). With reference to Neoplatonic 
philosophy and apophatic theology, Abbate articulates acts of “understate-
ment and silence” to a kind of “social reality” with ethical implications (530). 
She advances the idea that “engagement with music [is] tantamount to an 
engagement with the phenomenal world and its inhabitants” (530). The en-
counter with the other that emerges, first, by way of point-blank immedia-
cy and, second, by the logic of reflection, emerges in this third articulation 
by way of a grammar of equivalence. The ethical consequences of all three 
modalities of engagement seems to be the same. In a scenario where social 
engagement is considered as alike to musical engagement, for instance, we 
take away the following moral lesson: “Playing or hearing music can pro-
duce a state where resisting the flaw of loquaciousness represents a moral 
ideal, marking human subjects who have been remade in an encounter with 
an other” (530, emphasis added). Here we find—in the paradoxical name of 
an ethics of abstinence—a tangible encounter with a human/musical other 
that leaves on its subjects a kind of (deconstructive?) mark. Is this a kind of 
soft hermeneutics redux? Perhaps. The larger points, however, are, first, that 
these are clandestine rubrics—rubrics that deploy drastic musical encounter 
as a cipher for an ethics in the social world; and, second, that the fact that 
a diversity of rhetorical rubrics—reflection, immediacy, and equivalence—
lead to the same goal in the context of the drastic encounter probably marks 
a site of desire—a wish for social relevance in the stark silence of withdrawal.

In the final analysis, the ethics of drastic encounter, however tangibly ar-
rested by presence, resemble less the agnosticism we find in the starkly un-
edifying productions of presence in Gumbrecht’s formulation than they do 
the deconstructive abeyance we find in the thought of Jacques Derrida. De-
construction of course rejects the self-uttering claims of presence, and marks 
instead the differential mediations attendant to our very hold on presence. In 
Abbate’s text, presence is at once embraced and denied the violence of such 
claims. Far from the violence implied by Gumbrecht’s arrested bodies, that 
is, presence in the context of the drastic is held at arm’s length, kept unsullied 
by gnostic determination, set free. Herein lies one of the conundrums faced 
by simultaneously tethering presence to the event, on the one hand, and to 
the ephemeron, on the other. Caught in the crosshairs of this riddle-like 
suspension, we now find a noteworthy reversal of fortune for ethics in the 



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context of theories of presence. Of the strained claim to social relevance—
gnostic abstinence in the face of drastic experience—one might say its value 
resides in the proximity of deconstruction. However, where a deconstructive 
operation such as différance nonetheless engages the nominal accretions and 
attendant effects of presence (via the internal structures of differing and de-
ferring, etc.), the ethics of drastic encounter—at risk of ensnaring them in 
gnostic determination—disengages from them entirely. The political and so-
cial relevance of deconstruction is contested and in doubt, of course, even as 
Derrida (in his final years) insisted on the importance of the decision in the 
experience of the undecidable.39 For the purposes of this argument, however, 
it is important to note, first, that Abbate’s ethical abeyance is more allied 
with Derrida’s deconstructive maneuvers than it is with Gumbrecht’s story 
about presence; and, second, that even the (minimal) social relevance of de-
constructive undecidability withers in the context of drastic withdrawal—its 
totalizing gnostic prohibition. This is the radical blank of the point-blank. 

Technomystical Repetitions

Suppose music really does know best (“the matrix of sounds explains the 
structures of power”) and gives access to otherwise lost information, revela-
tions about humankind or its societies that no other art can transmit. Sup-
pose music has important secrets pouring from it and our enigma machine 
with the correct cylinder merely needs to be put in place; that is a tempting 
vision.40 

These are the suppositions that modulate from Abbate’s reflections on mu-
sic’s radical openness toward a critique of technology—the machining of 
an enigma—in the context of drastic musical experience. By endowing a 
machine (with appropriately fitted cylinders) the power to decode a her-
meneutically-slippery medium, gnostic knowledge takes on the character 
of decryption. Abbate calls these machinations of the machine the “cryp-
tographic sublime” (524). Far from actually approaching the sublime, how-
ever, this knowledge amounts to little more than sonified fraud. For Ab-

39 See, for example, Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (Lon-
don: Verso, 2005).

40 Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” 524. The quotation in parentheses is Abbate’s 
own translation of the blurb from the original dust jacket of Jacques Attali, Bruits (Paris: 
Presses Universitaires de France, 1977).



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bate, the symptomatic fallout from techno-trickery of this sort is twofold. 
First, real music is eroded, if not entirely eliminated, by the technological 
apparatus, and second, embezzled gnostic determinations are granted an 
aura of technical objectivity. 

First, on the loss of real music at the hands of technological intervention, 
Abbate writes: “That technology, codes, inscription metaphors, and mech-
anisms flow into musical hermeneutics is not, however, just an entertaining 
foible. They represent the excluded presence of real music, the material and 
carnal as displaced onto technology” (527). Theodor Adorno’s seismograph 
and Jacques Attali’s magnetic tape constitute so much “technomysticism” 
to (fraudulently) spirit forth gnostic secrets as it spirits away drastic pres-
ence (527). Left in the wake of music’s banished materiality and carnality, 
these technical decoding devices proffer a kind of fake presence—the “false 
Eros and synthetic carnality” of a technological metaphor (529). Under the 
spell of gnostic technomysticism, we are left with a music without music. 
This is a curious upshot for a position deeply immersed in music’s ephem-
erality—real music—“so personal, contingent, fugitive to understanding” 
(529, emphasis added). Whence this fugitive? If music’s vanishing act en-
tails its escape, even hiding, from all understanding, under what conditions 
can one posit a music with music—a music that will not betray the site of its 
hiding? The question arises: How, where, and when is banished sound—a 
particular instance of its disavowal—distinct from vanished sound—a gen-
eral condition of its ephemerality?

Second, on the aura of technical objectivity in the context of gnostic 
fraud, Abbate writes, “music qua machine traces what is there without sub-
jective bias, thus when music and my argument run along the same lines 
my argument cannot be assailed” (529). In other words, the precarious hold 
on gnostic thought in the throes of drastic experience is pitted against the 
gnostic secrets that are paradoxically amplified by complex decoding ma-
chines and inscription devices. Abbreviated in value—“a state of unresolved 
and subservient alterity” (524, emphasis added)—the drastic is left to linger 
in the confines (at best) of subjective bias, while—bolstered by the full au-
dio-visual technological apparatus—the gnostic reigns supreme, “untran-
scendable” (527). Abbate’s essay seeks to upend this hierarchized opposi-
tion, of course, by advancing a seemingly irreducible fact about listening—
the de facto overwhelming character of its live presence. At one point in her 
experience of Laurie Anderson’s performance piece Happiness on March 
15, 2002, for example, Abbate heard a devastating sound emerge from the 
clicking of teeth: “a loud boom with no reverberation” (533). The sound, 



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which triggered “real terror” (conjuring, as it did, “the sound of bodies hit-
ting the ground from great heights”), leads Abbate to reflect on the impor-
tance of what happened “at that moment;” the trigger that occurred in the 
“right now” (533–534, emphasis added). In contrast to the drastic experience 
elicited in this radically temporalized present, Abbate examines the kinds 
of experience attendant to atemporal technologies of reproduction. She rhe-
torically asks: “The very fact of recording—as any future audience can ex-
perience this event that came into presence (to echo Gumbrecht) only via its 
repeatable surrogate—does that not alter a basic alchemy, making the event 
an artifact, handheld and under control, encouraging distance and reflec-
tion?” (534). Although Abbate briefly acknowledges that both drastic and 
gnostic elements can “furnish a simultaneous ground under the sonic cir-
cus” (533)—indeed, it is this simultaneity that constitutes an alchemy—the 
true insight to which this kind of statement points is that the recording is, of 
itself, substitutive. In other words, the recording only implausibly approach-
es the radical presence of the event. It offers repetition for singularity, con-
trol for wildness, and distance and reflection for immersion and absorption 
in the actual event. Interestingly, Abbate’s skepticism toward reproducibili-
ty and repetition is, if not fully argued, repetitively asserted throughout the 
text. The example of an unrepeatable drastic encounter in 2002 thereby par-
adoxically repeats a central tenet of Abbate’s text. As if under the guidance 
of the formal demands of a rondo, we read again a slightly varied version of 
what we read before. The “repeatable surrogate” that makes of an event an 
artifact, “handheld and under control,” imitatively echoes the point, made 
over twenty pages earlier, that recordings are “technologically constructed 
hyperperformances, which we can arrest and control” (512). This is the idea, 
as it were, that the essay arrests under its own “aspect of eternity” (512). Even 
if repetition is the primary rhetorical vehicle for asserting the idea, we are 
warned once more of the technical conditions for placing the drastic fugi-
tive under arrest—the drastic, in other words, as always-already arrested 
and controlled in contexts of technological repeatability. 

But therein lies a key aspect of the dialectics of repetition. “Gnostic sat-
isfactions can become pale,” we are told in connection with Abbate’s riff 
against the technical reproduction of the drastic experience of Anderson’s 
performance (534). But, as with Walter Benjamin’s aura, repetition can both 
wither (or render pale) and amplify (or brighten) the drastic experience. 
Without rehearsing once more the valorization of reproduction technolo-
gies (phonography, radio, tape, etc.) we find in the writings Schaeffer, Chion 
and others, it is clear that repetition actually triggers drastic experience in 



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Abbate’s universe as well. After all, the alchemical amalgam—“live pres-
ence and secret knowledge” (534)—accruing to the moment of terror was 
itself “guided by earlier references to the World Trade Center’s destruction” 
(533). The troubling return to earlier references in the drastic moment here 
is not simply meant to rehearse that often-repeated insight that gnostic 
knowledge sponsors drastic experience. This truism constitutes the crux 
of Karol Berger’s insubstantial response to Abbate’s challenging text. The 
takeaway of Berger’s response can be summed up in a single sentence: 
“There is no such thing as pure experience, uncontaminated by interpreta-
tion.”41 While Berger is attempting to demonstrate that musical perception 
is in fact subtended by a broader sphere of human experience, this kind of 
truism—a tautology in recoil from the drastic—can quickly organize itself 
into a system for containing the frictions of nature, history, and perception. 
Indeed, it is the imposition that material presence brings to such conclu-
sive organized systems to which theories of affect, the drastic, etc.—to their 
credit—attend. Although it is inconsistently articulated, Abbate’s appeal to 
unbidden materializations of presence—such as the “neurological misfire” 
in the context of a scene in an opera, for example (535)—bear witness to the 
challenge of frictional encounter. The closed-circuit production of mean-
ing, in contrast, issues a new set of perils that cannot simply spirit away 
the impositions of tangible experience in its own systematic maelstrom of 
interpretation and mediation. What is troubling about Abbate’s return to 
gnostic invocations—“earlier references to the World Trade Center’s de-
struction,” and so on—is distinct from this catch-all coign of vantage. 

There are two specific points to be made at this juncture. First, the rever-
sion to the gnostic—the “secret knowledge of the hidden signified” (534)—
which triggered the terror, was itself attributed to, first, a microphonic am-
plification of teeth clenching; and, second, a documentary recording by the 
Naudet brothers of the 9/11 disaster. Abbate adds, “No one who has seen the 
documentary forgets the sound [of bodies hitting the ground from great 
heights]” (534). Of course, Abbate concedes that this is a site of “hermeneu-
tic alchemy” (535)—not an unfettered presence—but the matter is not set-
tled by way of a simple acknowledgement. To begin with, all aspects of an 
elaborate argument about the clandestine operations of technomysticism 
are now placed under strain. How so? First, the gnostic signified that sets 
off the drastic intensity of terror is issued by way of the very seismographic 

41 Karol Berger, “Music According to Don Giovanni, or: Should We Get Drastic?” Journal 
of Musicology 22, no. 3 (2005): 497.



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technology that is construed as more than mere amplification, registering 
instead “imperceptible shifts below the threshold of perception” (528)—the 
“technomysticism” that rejects vulgar representation for “buried, under-
ground, tectonic vastness,” inscription, and so on. Second, the triggering is 
issued by way of the very technology of reproduction that is construed as the 
“repeatable surrogate” that alters drastic experience—brings it “under con-
trol,” solicits “distance and reflection,” and so on (534). But this is not all, 
for the particular terror it triggers falls, above all, under the aspect of eter-
nity—“no one who has seen the documentary forgets the sound.” No one 
forgets. In other words, the drastic experience qua experience is here lodged 
firmly in the atemporal structure Abbate once associated with gnostic in-
vestigations—“abstractions … under the aspect of eternity” (512)—and not, 
strictly speaking, in the ephemerality of the moment alone. The fact that 
there is no unforgetting the sound, as well as the fact that the recorded 
sound was repeated by other technological means, is structurally central to 
the experience. This is not the place to dissect the dialectics of trauma, but 
it remains evidently open to discussion whether what is at stake here is a 
species of repetition compulsion or, as maintained, simply held in the grip 
of a singular ephemeral event alone. 

The Gnostic Redux (Of White Elephants)

The second problem attendant to Abbate’s reversion to gnostic knowledge 
for leveraging examples of drastic encounter is more paradoxical still. Take 
Abbate’s experience of despair when Ben Heppner’s voice cracked on high 
notes early in the performance of Die Meistersinger at the Met in 2001. 
While most of the singers belted forth in a kind of “psychotic … joll[iness],” 
Abbate bore witness to the “raw courage and sangfroid” of a singer who 
refused to give up—“a unique human being in a singular place and time, 
falling from the high wire again and again” (535). Abbate writes, “I was 
transfixed not by Wagner’s opera but by Heppner’s heroism … the singu-
lar demonstration of moral courage, which, indeed, produces knowledge of 
something fundamentally different and of a fundamentally different kind 
… drastic knowledge” (535). What is fascinating here is that Abbate con-
nects drastic knowledge with the question concerning morality. Again, it 
would be an inadequate truism to simply point out that Abbate’s intimate 
knowledge of the operatic work is the condition for the possibility of this 
drastic experience. Indeed, given that Heppner’s voice cracked in the first 



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strophe of the preliminary version of the Prize Song, she made “a quick cal-
culation that he had five more strophes in two full verses in the preliminary 
version,” not to mention the many versions of the song, still to come (535). 
Of course the work-concept here circumscribes the event; it is the meta-
physical a priori that is the condition for the possibility of this despairing 
experience, no less than the neurological misfire to come a few days later. 
But this insufficiently registers the challenge of Abbate’s experience of the 
scenario at the Met. Neither will it do to simply point out that Heppner’s 
morality is cut of a drastically different cloth from the ethics attendant to 
drastic experience, as it is understood by Abbate. In other words, the moral 
courage of Heppner’s plunging-forth can hardly be recreated under the ru-
bric of an ethics of hesitation and withdrawal. But this is where Abbate’s 
insight into the moment may actually provide a basis for revising her more-
or-less deconstructive ethical stance, and, especially, for moderating the 
starkly agnostic one held by Gumbrecht. Heppner’s is the courage of persis-
tence, not that of reticence. 

But the more vexing problem emerges when we consider these kinds of 
experience in relation to an aesthetic tradition that valorizes the unexpected 
in art—the aesthetics of radical becoming, innovation, and transformation; 
the transfiguration of the commonplace, and so on. The terror triggered 
by an alchemical blend of drastic and gnostic in Laurie Anderson’s perfor-
mance of Happiness, no less than the despair launched in the context of a 
quick calculation (and a subsequent neurological misfire) of Ben Heppner’s 
performances in a production of Die Meistersinger, are transmutations of 
this sort. In Heppner’s case, a vocal misfire on the high notes A and G sud-
denly launched the real possibility of total embarrassment and scandal; and 
in Anderson’s case, an echoless thud suddenly launched the listener into 
the horror of processing again an event of real death. Without diminishing 
their intensity, these drastic experiences are wholly consistent with the ro-
mantic aesthetics of transfiguration—Christian Friedrich Michaelis’s pow-
erfully startling experience, Edmund Burke’s sublime suddenness, Imma-
nuel Kant’s transcendence of empirical standards, and so on—updated here 
for the era of post-postmodernism. Art becomes life. First a boom without 
reverb propels the listener into an unbearable confrontation with an actual 
scene of murderous death and, second, a vocal misfire catapults the living 
struggle of a great hero onto the opera stage. This crypto-romantic maneu-
ver is not objectionable in itself, but it does raise a set of different questions, 
which, again, create the conditions for the undermining of large swaths of 
Abbate’s general argument. 



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In what sense? First, recall the importance of the non-conceptual import 
of the drastic—its direct tethering to music qua music—the “elephant in the 
room” (533). How exactly do the examples provided by the specific experi-
ences of performances by Anderson and Heppner tally with this aspiration 
toward registering affects and effects of music qua music? How responsive 
are these examples to qualities and problems peculiar to music? In both 
cases, the answer to this question is unsatisfactory. Not only is Heppner 
actually trying to hide and disguise his errors for most of the performance, 
but the cover-up actually registers the fact that the cracking high notes 
constitute the noise that undermines the music. Of course, the possibility 
of a vocal misfire constitutes an element of opera’s considerable aesthetic 
pleasures, but, nonetheless, the drastic despair is located not in the mu-
sic as much as in its ever-lurking noisy other. Furthermore, the moral of 
Heppner’s courage resides in his ability to continue in full knowledge of 
what happened and what awaits. This—the crux of the drastic despair—is 
not, however, peculiar to music. Suppose a marathon runner leading the 
pack suddenly sprains an ankle a mile out from the finishing line, pushes 
through the pain, and despite competitors closing-in, persists to the end, 
victorious: Is this drastic event not of the same species as that in December 
2001 at the Met? Does this form of “drastic knowledge” not likewise register 
“a unique human being in a singular place and time,” “the singular demon-
stration of moral courage,” and so on (535)? But if a sporting event so easily 
recapitulates the affective crux of the musical one, does the precise modali-
ty of drastic despair experienced by Abbate not equally bypass the elephant 
in the room, the phenomenal reality of music qua music? The same problem 
accrues to the example on March 15, 2002. Suppose the smoke rising from 
the ash of a cigarette triggers unbidden images of the smoldering World 
Trade Center: does this not constitute a similar traumatic trigger to that 
experienced by clicking teeth? In fact, are traumatic flashbacks not, by defi-
nition, deeply unpredictable—seeking out capriciously dispersed outlets? 
As a trigger of this media-indifferent sort, is not the quest to unpack what 
is peculiar to the inherently sonic dimensions of that echoless resonance a 
troubled one? In short, has the elephant in the room—music qua music—
become the white elephant once more? 

Paradoxically, Abbate’s demonstration of the drastic in these examples 
is at once too abstracted from the materiality of presence unique to music 
qua music (as shown above) and too immersed in the gnostic specificity 
of their actual musical workings. Let me elaborate on the latter point. In 
connection with the Heppner incident, Abbate writes: “I was transfixed 



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not by Wagner’s opera but by Heppner’s heroism … the singular demon-
stration of moral courage … [what] one could call … drastic knowledge” 
(535). Abbate rehearses the fact the she is in fact well acquainted with the 
“literature on Meistersinger,” with its “unspoken anti-Semitic underside,” 
its problematic “reception history,” and even its own claims to a “nonsig-
nifying discourse” that may give voice to “something appalling” (535–536). 
However, the drastic trigger that produced the despair and, later, the hallu-
cination were set adrift from this entire corpus of hermeneutic knowledge 
no less than the formal qualities of the actual work. Abbate’s experience 
emerged in a schism—“essentially, a split where the performance drowned 
out the work” (535)—whereby perception, ensnared in the immediacy of 
drastic presence, veered irredeemably away from the protocols of the opera 
itself. But is this in fact so? Here is a basic (hermeneutic) outline of the op-
era: Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger is more or less a comedic musical 
drama about musical creativity and its relation to social reproduction. The 
masters’ guild of musicians in Nürnberg is populated by, on the one hand, 
pedantic conservatives and, on the other, open-minded liberals. The central 
protagonist of the story, Walther von Stolzing (sung by Heppner in the per-
formances Abbate attended), is not in the guild, but his superior musician-
ship is indisputable. Unorthodox as they are, his musical gifts are matched 
only by his passion for Eva, whose hand shall be received in marriage by the 
best singer in the midsummer song competition. In fact, the erotic striving 
associated with the prize is narratively allied with the passionate voicing 
associated with the song. Despite a series of setbacks (hence the ongoing 
revisions of the prize song with its demanding high Gs and As), Walther 
is eventually able to harness (marry!) his creative penchant for rupturing 
established musical norms with the sanctioned musical forms established 
by the guild. Walther endures numerous obstacles and struggles with the 
institutional politics around him, but he eventually wins the hand of Eva. 
Indeed, it is Walther’s final prize song that ultimately exemplifies the ap-
propriate integration of inspiration and form. 

With Eva im Paradies, one might ask, how is this unimaginable joy 
properly resonant with a case of drastic despair? In fact, by the time of the 
happy scene-change of act 3—“full of candy-store delights,” with its “sunny 
meadow,” and the chorus belting theme songs “at the top of its lungs” (535)—
Heppner’s rickety vocalizations (potentially careening toward a melody-
killing quandary) seem to mark a stark disconnect between the signifying 
order and affective intensity. Abbate’s uneasy feeling about the demeanor of 
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in the moment of Heppner’s vocal misfire—now probably counts as a 
kind of premonition of the “optical hallucination, a genuine neurological 
misfire” that occurred three days later (535). This remarkable moment—
Abbate “saw stage figures not as they were, in Technicolor Germanic finery, 
but shrouded in black with white faces and tragic eyes under bright white 
lights” (535)—became a kind of unbidden neurological restaging of the 
second performance. Officially, the meaning of Abbate’s drastic encounter 
is that there is a fundamental asynchrony between drastic and gnostic 
orders; that the drastic attitude had prevailed against the hermeneutic pull 
of the gnostic. In Abbate’s words: “The second performance would not have 
fractured had my experience of the first not been so radically attentive to 
what was taking place, so inattentive to Wagner’s Meistersinger and what 
its music means or conceals” (536). This is the official story. Unofficially, 
however, the drastic affect of Abbate’s hallucinatory restaging actually 
recapitulates the wholly gnostic central dialectic of Die Meistersinger’s 
narrative. As it is with the fictional Walther von Stolzing, the real Ben 
Heppner must now harness his “extraordinary raw courage and sangfroid” 
to overcome the odds of disrupting the musical forms to which his singing is 
socially and institutionally enjoined (535). The hallucination is an uncanny 
recapitulation in real life of the Wahn that may ensue the entire operatic 
scene should our heroes’ (respective) moral courage fail them. It is not only 
that the musical work—the content of a romantic Meisterwerk—makes an 
uncanny return in the event of a neurological misfire, but, more than that, 
it is that a nonconscious Werktreue actually leaves an indelible mark on 
it. This story about affect—about the drastic encounter so “inattentive” to 
the gnostic—is nonconsciously, but tellingly, a story about a gnostic second 
coming. Is this a paradoxical return—apparently caught in drastic throes of 
intensity—of the cultivated gnostic repressed? 

The point of this re-telling of an encounter so apparently personal and 
ephemeral is not to dismiss outright the claims of the drastic, but, far from 
it, to reposition the force of the drastic in a region unfamiliar, not only 
to its gnostic fellow traveler, but also to the experienced reality at hand. I 
want to draw attention to the curious imbrication of the obvious and the 
obscure in these drastic encounters. The experience of terror attendant to 
Laurie Anderson’s performance, too, is not a case of the off-script drastic 
as much as it bears the marks of the all-too-gnostic figure of the drastic. In 
other words, aside from the acknowledged alchemy, Anderson’s 2002 per-
formance piece was awash in anecdotes that referenced the destruction of 
the World Trade towers in September 2001. These included direct referenc-



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es—the way Anderson had watched and listened to the towers being built 
over the years, a few blocks from her home, for example—and, perhaps 
more importantly, indirect ones, which, in their own way, illustrated trau-
matic reminders of the past event. For example, she recited a story of her rat 
terrier, Lolabelle, out on a walk in the safe-seeming mountains of Califor-
nia shortly after 9/11. Following an uneventful preamble where the narrator 
recollects little more than the character of the dog’s ambling and rambling, 
she suddenly notices a new expression on the dog’s face; one she had not 
seen before. This was the expression marking Lolabelle’s realization, with 
large birds hovering over her, that she was prey; and that, furthermore, the 
once neutral sky had now been transformed into a menacing presence, as if 
there was something wrong with the air. It was the look on Lolabelle’s face, 
in turn, that triggered for Anderson an expression she had, in fact, seen 
before—the expression of her neighbors in New York City right after 9/11. 
This was the look that too marked the realization that danger could come 
from the air; and that, furthermore, from this menacing realization, there 
would be no turning back. 

Having been primed with anecdotes such as this—not simply images of 
9/11, but references to the uncanny mechanisms that trigger these images—
the reaction of terror to the clicking of teeth is what one might describe as 
a case of getting it. This is not to say that the reaction simply makes sense, 
but that it is in keeping with the fundamental points of Anderson’s perfor-
mance. It is, as it were, an accurate response to contextual cues that cannot 
be subtracted from the scene. In other words, the drastic experience hereby 
appropriately recoups the gnostic dimensions of the work. The point could 
be amplified in the context of Anderson’s observation in Happiness that 
many of the horrifying images of the smoldering towers circulating on tel-
evision at the time were mostly without accompanying sound. This led her 
to reflect on whether the microphones were shut off, or the cameras too far 
from the action, or whether the explosions and cries were simply unrecord-
able. In other words, the terrifying intensity of the event here obliterates an 
aspect of representability, leaving us with the repetitious dream-like silence 
of the television loops. Anderson’s reflection on the event of 9/11 and its 
peculiar recording reveals a surreptitious linkage to Abbate’s theory of the 
drastic itself, equally pitting representation and recording against the per-
plexing intensity of the actual event. But for the purposes of this argument, 
it suffices to note that the gnostic not only sponsors the drastic a priori, but 
that the gnostic here makes another uncanny return, a posteriori. While 
the event of the performance does not necessarily spell out gnostic scripts 



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of cultural data, the appropriately-immersed viewer is nonetheless held in 
the arms of their conditioning force. In other words, this is not a simple 
recapitulation of the clandestine cipher of the hermeneutic object that Ab-
bate carefully puts into question throughout the text, but rather its uncan-
ny gnostic redux, coiled up within drastic experience. 

Sound Fraud: From Illicit to Complicit Relocation

If it is true, at least in some significant senses and cases, that the latent gnos-
tic recurs at the core of the blatant drastic, it behooves us to consider more 
seriously—in the contexts of ethics and politics—the force of audile reflex 
and its habituation. One may speak here of the habitus of sensory experi-
ence, which regards drastic encounter not as the nonconscious, open-ended 
material experience of the ephemeral presence of a live event, as we find in 
Abbate, but instead as the unconscious recurrence of cultivated assump-
tions, reflexes, instincts, habits, and techniques within that experience. 
What is fascinating about this reconfiguration of the drastic is the way mu-
sic’s seemingly inherent ephemerality and ineffability falls prey not only 
to the gnostic determinations of hermeneutics and formalism, but also to 
the drastic overdeterminations of sensory habitūs. The gnostic redux can 
be characterized as the recurrence of a certain guiding foreknowledge in 
the context of variable reflexes of the body. In other words, the cultivation 
of body techniques is a partial condition for the possibility of their noncon-
scious drastic reflexes—again, the coiled drastic dressage. 

What do we make of those phenomena said to fall outside the logic and 
grasp of the gnostic? What dimensions of music, in particular—given the 
uncanny duplicitous layers of its cultivated entanglements—remain outside 
of the second enclosure of the gnostic? What remains of its dimensions 
of ephemerality and ineffability? Is the event of music qua music—envel-
oped, as it were, by dual (and dueling) atemporal specters of temporal ex-
perience—therefore more ineffable still than the concept of the drastic can 
permit? Or is music’s claimed or real ineffability—in a dialectical Schulter-
schluss with its “broad shoulders”—in fact a useful alibi for disavowing its 
genuine capacity for social danger—manipulation, discrimination, fear- 
and hatred-mongering, and so on (521, 523)? To situate this point in the 
context of the previous example, what if the resistance to gnostic error in 
the drastic experience of terror reveals itself rather as a resistance to its 
truth (or, at least, its accuracy)? 



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For Abbate, gnostic attributions in the context of music are dismissed 
tout court as so many forms of clandestine mysticism: “Any argument that 
discovers legible meanings or significations within music is granting mu-
sic certain grandiose powers” (517)—powers it simply does not possess, 
subsisting, as does music (after all), in a state of “unresolved and subservi-
ent alterity” (524). Paradoxically, however, these powers accrue in inverse 
proportion to their legitimacy. Furthermore, music’s “messages,” “cultural 
facts,” or “associations” also gain authority paradoxically because of their 
misplaced media-specificity; they become “more signally important, more 
persuasive—than the same cultural facts or associations or constructed ob-
jects as conveyed or released by any other media” (517, emphasis added). 
In other words, it is music’s very ineffability—its nonsignifying mediatic 
condition—that mystically intensifies the significations that are illicitly at-
tributed to it. As it is with “film and advertising,” musical works are thus 
“conscripted” to be “used or exploited” by music scholarship in its gnostic 
moment (517). By decking out these messages, facts and associations with 
“acoustic aura and sonic gift wrap,” they become “less banal than they are 
by themselves”; in short, “the ordinary becomes a revelation” (518). 

Interestingly, Abbate connects this understanding of music’s revelatory 
force to the theoretical inclinations of nineteenth-century metaphysics, and 
its afterlife in twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Nietzsche’s interest in lis-
tening to the musical aspect of language—“with the third ear”—for example, 
is a forerunner to the transverbal mode of listening—attentive to “phonic 
or musical element[s]”—that are said to register the unconscious (518).42 It 
is this alluring association—between music’s “pre-specular” character and 
what Theodor Reik calls the “substructures of the soul”—that Abbate puts 
into question: “Because the musical element is so open to interpretation, so 
unable to contest whatever supra-audible import it is assigned, conceptions 
about the psychic ill drawn from outside the musical domain become what 
the music is saying or revealing” (518). This is a fascinating paradox. Music 
is construed here as a kind of whore for meaning—it is “so open to inter-
pretation, so unable to contest”; it “unleashes potential meanings in high 
multiples”; it has “‘broad shoulders’ to bear whatever specific meaning we 
ascribe to it and ‘will never give us the lie,’” and so on—and, at the same 

42 Abbate refers to Nieztsche’s expression in Beyond Good and Evil, §246, as elaborated in 
the writings of Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experience of a Psycho-
analyst (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948) and Roland Barthes and Roland Havas, “Listening,” 
in Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representa-
tion, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 245–260.



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time, the virgin of meaning—music’s “ineffability”; its “indeterminacy”; its 
“mutability”; its “freedom,” of which one should “not tak[e] advantage,” and 
so on (516–517). Recall that the ethics of drastic encounter lies in a mode of 
abstinence: hesitating before the act of exploiting, using, or taking advan-
tage of music. As a medium that is all-too-yielding, music becomes a fertile 
site for opportunistic fact-, meaning-, and truth-making. In other words, 
music’s very lack—resistant, that is, to the genuine art of encoding cultural 
phenomena—is constitutively linked to its excess—its abundant dissemina-
tion of coded phenomena, as diverse as they are implausible. 

On the one hand, Abbate astutely identifies, and then beautifully articu-
lates, the peculiar magic of this link, but, on the other hand, not enough sur-
prise is expressed at the mechanism by which a transdiscursive experience 
actually amplifies the discourse it is erroneously said to encode. By what 
magical mechanism do the constructed significations—meanings, cultural 
phenomena, sublimated “truths”—metamorphose into significations that 
are actually “more authoritative,” “grandiose,” “revelatory,” “more securely 
affirmed when music is seen to express them,” or “made monumental and 
given aura by music” (517–520, emphasis added)? In other words, what is 
it about the acoustic aura and the sonic gift wrap that allures its beholder 
not only to take the hermeneutic bait, but to do so more affirmatively than 
its soundless counterpart? This increase in music’s signifying gravitas, par-
adoxically again, appears to be tethered to extra-musical media. In other 
words, music’s inherent aversion to encoding is actually marked by its abil-
ity to switch signification according to visual and verbal cues and contexts. 
In this sense, it is not absolute or autonomous, for Abbate, but all-too-pro-
grammatic, all-too-heteronomous. She writes that “physical grounding 
and visual symbolism and verbal content change musical sounds by rec-
ommending how they are to be understood” (524, emphasis added). The 
paradox, then, is that music’s wild indeterminacy—its effortless facility for 
actually switching signification, under the weight, say, of “oculocentric and 
logocentric” inputs—is allied to its peculiar capacity for raising the onto-
logical stakes of that signification—how it is to be understood (524). Music’s 
evident facility for switching meaning, in short, secures an authoritative 
affirmation for when it does not. If gnostic arrogation puts the gift-giving 
bird in the cage, as it were—and, concomitantly, deconstruction attempts to 
set free a caged bird—then, in contrast to both, the drastic power of music 
is such that it holds the uncaged bird in the hand. The drastic, after all, is 
wild even at point-blank range. This is the manipulative magic not of bait-
and-switch, but of switch-and-bait.



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The problem with simply announcing the alchemical alliance between 
image/word and music/sound is that it passes over precisely the drastic 
aspect of music’s materiality that is the object of inquiry. Not only do sonic 
gift wraps and acoustic auras rarely count as evidence in any fields outside 
of musicology and (to a lesser extent) music theory, but, as articulated 
above, the force of music’s interpretability seems to be leveraged by its 
drastic indeterminacy. What if, as announced above, the antithesis is 
true? What if the drastic is the site par excellence not of open-endedness 
but of nonconscious overdetermination? Take the case of racism in 
sound: Abbate is skeptical of claims that Wagner’s anti-Semitism can 
be sonically sublimated into musical works, for example, in spite of the 
composer’s ample attestations to that claim. Abbate argues that Wagner’s 
argument itself partakes of the clandestine mysticism associated with 
the hermeneutic process—he reads “certain formal conventions in music 
by Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer as ineradicable signs, and truths by the 
basketful are discovered embodied in musical configurations” (519). 
Wagner’s hermeneutic maneuvering may attest to “truths” that amount 
to “anti-Semitic slanders,” while those of commentators like Richard 
Eichenauer or Richard Taruskin actually attempt to expose for critical 
scrutiny such anti-Semitism. For Abbate, in contrast, both positions share a 
fundamental kinship—“the hermeneutic process is the same on both sides” 
(519). As it is with Wagner’s riff on Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, Abbate 
contends, Taruskin’s evidence of Stravinsky’s anti-Semitism seems “less 
mundane and more securely affirmed when music is seen to express [it]” 
(520). What is interesting about this methodological association between 
Wagner and Taruskin is that the outcomes of their thinking across the 
terrain of musical expression arguably lead to opposing moral positions. In 
fact, one consequence of this argument can be summed up in the following 
formulation: Because of music’s drastic indeterminacy, its actual gnostic 
determinations are in fact morally variable as well. In gnostic mysticism, 
angels and devils may freely dwell. The key point is that, given the uncanny, 
but constitutive, link between drastic openness and an emboldened gnostic 
closure, the assertion of a moral position is ultimately determined not by 
music in its material presence, but by the contexts of its use alone.

The trouble with this kind of analysis of the drastic in music is that its 
utilitarian consequences cannot be sustained in the context of reflex au-
dibility. In other words, this construal of the drastic insufficiently grasps 
the force and inertia of certain gnostic intensities. Abbate is skeptical of 
all claims that associate “music with the unconscious,” and, even more so, 



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“the unconscious with occulted truth” (520). The first tension here is that 
the drastic, defined as nonsignifying intensity, actually bears something 
of a resemblance to the variously construed concepts of the unconscious 
Abbate seeks to critique. More importantly, however, the overarching skep-
ticism toward the unconscious and its occulted truths does not sufficient-
ly grasp the sonorous intensity that accrues to fixed gnostic commitments 
and reflexes of listening. At this point it is important to disentangle the 
gnostic handiwork of film, and particularly advertising, from that of music 
scholarship. These had been earlier affined in Abbate’s text—“conscripted,” 
in her words, “for similar duties” (517). However, the actual mechanisms by 
which advertising, on the one hand, and scholarship, on the other, exploit 
music, can be lumped together only awkwardly. Where branding, adver-
tising, and propaganda actually deploy music’s drastic qualities—its non-
signifying, nonconscious sensuous immediacy—to clinch an association, 
to sell a product, or to induce a political commitment, gnostic scholarly 
inquiry (especially that wedded to the social contingency of things) actually 
de-emphasizes the sonorous presence—the seduction of the performance 
experience—in service of meaning. Otherwise put, where advertising hitch-
es a ride on them, musicology stops up its ears to drastic sonorities. The lat-
ter, after all, is the “antihedonist patholog[y]” of musicology, which refuses 
“encountering a present other at point-blank range” (532). The distinction 
is important because in sonic branding, advertising, and propaganda, the 
sensuous materiality of the music determines the value of its (commodified 
or political) sociological object, while in musicology, the sociological object 
determines and ultimately limits the value of the music’s sensuous mate-
riality. Without addressing the complex dialectics of mood and meaning 
here, one may conclude that, surface affinities aside, the gnostic equiva-
lence between branding, advertising, and propaganda, on the one hand, 
and music scholarship, on the other, cannot be assumed. 

At the risk of igniting a stale debate about music’s meanings, it is clear that 
industry executives in sonic branding and advertising, no less than those 
in cinema and the music and gaming industries, do not share the view that 
music’s material presence and carnality is, at bottom, wholly ineffable. In the 
interests of brevity, a few brief examples will suffice. Recording artist and 
video game composer, Tom Salta, experimented with using an orchestral 
work by Ralph Vaughan Williams for the soundtrack of Grand Theft Auto.43 

43 Tom Salta, “The Art of Composing for Video Games” (keynote lecture, Music and the 
Moving Image, New York, May 21, 2010).



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In Salta’s view, straying so far from the stock sounds associated with the 
action of the game produced results as absurd and confusing as those of 
alien visual imagery. Music’s shoulders in Salta’s studio are not as broad as 
those found in Abbate’s argument. Concomitantly, the production of drastic 
presence is a central concern for commercial music engineers. These are the 
unique effects, alluring details, and expensive-sounding moments that char-
acterize industrial song composition. John Seabrook describes this practice 
in the context of commercial ballads: 

The money note is the moment in Whitney Houston’s version of the Dolly 
Parton song “I Will Always Love You” at the beginning of the third rendition 
of the chorus: pause, drum beat, and then ‘Iiiiiieeeeeeiiieeii will always love 
you.” It is the moment in the Céline Dion song from Titanic, “My Heart Will 
Go On”: the key change that begins the third verse, a note you can hear a hun-
dred times and it still brings you up short in the supermarket and transports 
you … to a world of grand romantic gesture— “You’re here.”44 

There is no doubt that these money notes (and even money silences!) are 
productions of presence that are overdetermined by cultural scripts, con-
structions, and conventions. However, they are not experienced as gnostic 
meanings, but rather as drastic intensities—a shiver down the spine, a wid-
ening of eyes, a tremor of the skin.

Herein lies the key paradox of the kinds of affective experience attendant 
to significant arenas of musical listening. Drastic moments—deeply an-
chored in culturally-scripted techniques (from simple sonic effects to laun-
dered money-notes)—are heard as immediate material acoustic phenom-
ena. This is not a simple reconfiguration of Abbate’s position for it adjusts 
the analytic gaze toward the obstinately a prioristic ear. Abbate casts doubt 
upon the arts of reading racial characteristics from purely musical sounds, 
for example, because the reality of drastic experience is nonsignifying. When 
Richard Eichenauer “read[s] out of the disembodied lines of a musical work 
the face of a particular racial character,” Abbate responds by mischievously 
associating this maneuver with Wagner’s troubling grasp of music’s embod-
iments of racial characteristics (519).45 The problem with Abbate’s construal 

44 John Seabrook, “The Money Note: Can the Record Business Survive?” New Yorker, July 
7, 2003, 45.

45 Abbate is quoting Richard Eichenauer, Musik und Rasse (München: Lehmann, 1932), 13 
from the translation provided by Leo Treitler, “Gender and Other Dualities of Music Histo-
ry,” in Solie, Musicology and Difference, 40.



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is that racism requires, as a condition for its efficient ideological function-
ing, a nonsignifying substrate. In other words, sonic markers of race—vocal 
idiolects, for example, or musical tropes—are functional sites of autonom-
ically experienced audile profiling. They play out in the ballpark of reflex—
that which cannot not be experienced. While Eichenauer’s account (or that 
of Taruskin) may be overdrawn, Abbate’s construal of the drastic, in vivid 
opposition to the gnostic, cannot spirit away the dialectics of the nonsigni-
fying signifier. It is a mistake to place the problem of racism squarely in a 
field of gnostic representation. Racism is infrequently the result of deliber-
ative thought, but embedded instead in connotations and cues that operate 
surreptitiously. The music and the sounds people make can solicit judgments 
about them that are as instantaneous as they can be brutal. To simplify a lit-
tle: the grain of African-American or Mexican-American voices, for example, 
or, of the melodic traits of Islamic calls to prayer, or even, of the rhythmic 
topoi and sharp-sounding harmonizations of African music, may in itself be 
a fully culturally-determined habitus—an ingrained grain—but, for better 
or worse, it is all-too-often experienced as nonconscious reflex for racialized 
apprehension.46 If the drastic component of this experience—nonsignifying, 
ineffable, etc.—amounts to (even if only on occasion) a sublimated cultural 
topos, then the act of withdrawal and abstinence risks becoming ideologi-
cal—the mute witness to potential injustice and inequality. One of the pri-
mary modes of listening involves a deictic function—involuntary triggers of 
collateral meaning—which we find in Schaeffer’s écouter, Barthes’ alertness, 
Chion’s indexical listening, and so on. Although this mode of listening is 
construed as the least musical one in these writers, the paradox of presence 
in Gumbrecht and Abbate is that it partakes liberally of deixis. Unless music 
is construed as absolutely autonomous of such listening, the repudiation of 
such collateral—pretending not to have what one in fact has—ushers the rou-
tine fraudulence of sonic dissimulation.47

46 There is a vast literature on the intersections of race, music, and sound, which cannot 
be listed here. A few instructive recent writings on vocal timbre include Nina Sun Eidsheim’s 
The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African-American Music (Durham: 
Duke University Press, 2018), Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cul-
tural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016), and Grant Olwage’s 
“The Class and Colour of Tone: An Essay on the Social History of Vocal Timbre,” Ethnomusi-
cology Forum 13, no. 2 (2004): 203–226. See also Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald 
Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

47 For Schaeffer, Barthes and Chion, of course, the deictic function is cordoned off from 
other modes of listening—such as the musical écouter réduite, psychoanalytic listening, and 
reduced listening respectively.



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The trouble with apparently nonsignifying (high-speed) sonic embodi-
ments of the drastic is that their exaggerated retreat from illicit relocation 
transforms what goes as the licit presence of drastic experience into a com-
plicit gnostic one. To remain with the example discussed above, racism (no 
less than other forms of routine discrimination) requires, for its systematic 
production, a surreptitious disavowal of its own existence. This is not to say 
that all musical and sonic events are socially legible tout court, but to recog-
nize that in practical contexts of prevailing intersubjective communication, 
it behooves us to grapple with those sonic markers—markers that identify, 
signify and discriminate (in all senses of these terms)—in whose sensuous 
grip we are reflexively engrossed. Discussions of affect and presence in mu-
sic might need to be released from the Kantian idea that music amounts to 
no more than imaginative flight without conceptualization—a traditional 
position rehearsed here as the nonsignifying drastic—and tethered to the 
equally Kantian idea that sound and music thereby freight signification 
without accountability. Just because the meanings translocated by sound 
and music are rarely decipherable in easy correlationist terms (Abbate’s cri-
tique accurately captures the excessive dependence on these terms in her-
meneutics and formalism), does not mean that it is either entirely ineffable 
or ephemeral. In the silence of the drastic we find the reign of the gnostic.

Finally, the productive aspect of drastic experience—a subject that would 
require an essay unto itself—is, for similar reasons, equally spirited away 
within the organizing axioms of Abbate’s account. As a final gesture toward 
the contours of such an inquiry, two brief examples will need to suffice. In 
a lone footnote, Abbate makes an important nod towards Elaine Scarry’s 
argument that beauty does not, as claimed, distract us from the phenom-
enal world, but actually intensifies our awareness of it (532).48 Although it 
is harnessed to buttress a claim against the hedonist rebuke mounted by 
gnostic scholarship, Scarry’s point actually poses a challenge to Abbate’s 
figure of the drastic, illuminating instead the clandestine gnostic entan-
glements—its capacity to intensify worldly engagement—of beauty. This 
is the antithesis of the racist reflex in sound, but the systematic tethering 
of drastic and gnostic is similar in both cases. Likewise, legal scholars are 
beginning to argue that affect does not lie outside of legal interpretation 
and protocol, but may in fact be a necessary ingredient for its proper func-
tioning. In the words of Emily White: “The affective aspects play a role in 

48 Abbate’s reference is to Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton 
University Press, 1999), 58–68.



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setting the emotion’s constituent desires for action. Without the affective 
dimension, emotions might, counterintuitively, be less answerable to their 
own distinctive built-in rationales.”49 Affect, in other words, operates not 
as an exterior element, but as a constitutively linked catalyst for sharpening 
gnostic rationales. The drastic encounter hones in on the gnostic collateral. 
For White, these affectively-refocused rationales actually scale to judicial 
interpretations of the values of human dignity itself. In contrast, the ethics 
of drastic withdrawal—which register the other only as (point) blank pres-
ence—risks serving as an ideological alibi for freighted meaning, effectively 
beating a retreat from holding the habituated reflex to account. Abstinence 
and withdrawal tarry here with refusal and denial. Where the drastic is 
understood as constitutively exclusive of the gnostic, we find the embodied 
reflex in medio musicorum posing as irreducible presence.

It is this radically inarticulate reflex, now reducible to a network of neu-
rons mapped by sensors on networked subjects—symbolic orders without 
accountability par excellence—that is readied for statistical expropriation 
in an era of industrialized computation. Separated by a chasm between mu-
sic’s material event and its ineffable ephemeron, the drastic functions like 
software itself—executing effects without explanation, accomplishments 
without understanding, realizations without representations. But that is 
another story…

49 Emily Kidd White, “A Study of the Role of Emotion in Judicial Interpretations of the 
Legal Value of Human Dignity Claims” (PhD diss., New York University School of Law, 
2017), 45.



event or ephemeron?190

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event or ephemeron?192

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Abstract

The study of music’s production, reproduction, and circulation is today suspended between 
two ruling paradigms—the methodological inclinations of musicology, on the one hand, and 
ethnomusicology, on the other. If the central referents for musicology (and especially its 
technical support system, music theory) exaggerate the importance of fixed texts (archival 
documents, audiovisual media, technical inscriptions, musical scores, recordings and tran-
scriptions, the organology of instrumentaria, etc.), their antithesis—the central referents 
for ethnomusicology—exaggerate the value of dynamic contexts (social processes, cultural 
practices, affect flows, conventions, interactions, agents and networks, etc.). This essay turns 
toward an intermediary point of focus—the role of performance itself as an opening into 
reflections on music qua music. In particular, this essay engages the challenges posed by a 
prominent theorist of sound, media, and performance, Carolyn Abbate, and the conception 
of the “drastic” in music. Written almost two decades ago, at a time when the Humanities un-
derwent an ostensible turn to affect, Abbate’s essay “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” detects in 
music scholarship an abundant engagement with music’s texts and contexts, and a simultane-
ous aversion toward music’s phenomenal reality, exemplified by its live performance. In “Mu-
sic—Drastic or Gnostic?” Abbate redresses the imbalance and offers avenues for addressing 
music’s material, embodied, and even spiritual presence. The essay is notable for catalyzing a 
series of shifts in music studies in the decades after its publication. 

My counter-argument is organized around four primary themes. First, it considers the 
precise performative modalities of music’s mediatic transmission for drastic listening. Sec-
ond, it outlines the entangled moral and ethical operations that are freighted by drastic 
encounter of musical performance. Third, it assesses the affordances and limits of reject-
ing music’s technological reproducibility. And fourth, it detects an uncanny return of the 
gnostic repressed at the core of drastic experience in real time. The conclusion of the essay 
demonstrates music’s paradoxical ontological status as both event and ephemeron, arguing 
that the drastic must be reconceived to genuinely acknowledge the sonorous presence of its 
socio-political collateral. The primary working example for the essay’s conclusion addresses 
the question of race and music. Its critical impulse notwithstanding, this essay also attempts 
to highlight the insights of Abbate’s account of musical performance and the inadequacy of 
the largely negative reaction to it. 

Martin Scherzinger is a composer and associate professor of media studies at New York
University. He works on sound, music, media, and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. Primary areas include the musical and choreographic traditions of Europe, Afri-
ca, and America as well as global biographies of sound and other ephemera circulating in 
geographically-remote regions. Scherzinger’s research includes the examination of links be-
tween political economy and digital sound technologies, intellectual property law in diverse 
sociotechnical environments, relations between aesthetics and censorship, sensory limits of 
mass-mediated music, mathematical geometries of musical time, histories of sound in phi-
losophy, and the politics of biotechnification.


