Talk: Susan McClary

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Sorry about truncated comment on last revision; I hit a key by mistake...

I moved discussion of Robert Walser off of the McClary page, so it won't look to anybody that we might be defining Prof. McClary as the wife of her husband.

Hyacinth, do you think you could maybe take on the big controversy that arose over McClary's discussion of the Ninth Symphony and the depiction of the feelings of a frustrated rapist? It's certainly something Prof. McClary is well known for, but it's material is so intense that one would have to be very careful in doing it in NPOV form.

Opus33 02:00, 10 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Oy! Contrary to popular anti-New Musicology opinions (ick, double ick triple ick), McClary did NOT declare the Beethoven's Ninth a model of rape, that distinction instead goes to another woman (who's name eludes me). At one point McClary apparently did agree as she wrote in an article: "The point of recapitulation in the first movement in the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release." However, she seems to have mellowed by the time she wrote Feminine Endings and she praised Beethoven in Conventional Wisdom.

Anyways, I really would love to describe McClary's writings in depth (I started the article on her in the first place), but it won't happen anytime soon. Once I feel like reading her books again (which will happen), I will discuss and summarize.Hyacinth 02:32, 10 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, Hyacinth. I've seen other links like your "ick" cases. The challenge in writing up this episode, if the task ever gets done, would be to cover the whole range of opinion. The right wingers such as you cite certainly took the famous passage as a handy tool for bashing modern humanities scholars, but there are other communities whose opinion one would also want to include, such as traditional musicologists (see recent article by Steven Lubin in Early Music) or a certain fraction of the people who were upset by the passage in question simply because they venerate Beethoven and love his music. I hope you enjoy your further exploration of the McClary oeuvre and that you will contribute further to a high-quality NPOV presentation of her work. Opus33 05:09, 10 Jan 2004 (UTC)

See Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music. Hyacinth 01:44, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The one thing that seems to be missing is the suggestion that McClary, like many before, proposed a hypothesis of what the piece was "about" and that this need not be insulting. People often disagree on what pieces, books, movies, 'real' events, etc. are "about". There are many ways of listening and interpreting, and users of different ways often come to the "opposite" conclusions, and this is usually considered okay, a part of the subjectivity that is often valued in art and other fields. Hyacinth 00:51, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hi Hyacinth, in the most recent revision I tried to back off a bit on the "insulting" part. I hope this helps.

Even so, I have to say that if I had written the Ninth Symphony myself (fat chance!), I would feel really, really insulted by what McClary said. Wouldn't you? Of course we'll never know what Beethoven himself would have thought... Yours very truly, Opus33 07:23, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

That would be the other thing that is missing, the suggestion that maybe Beethoven intended to depict rape and would be, if still living, happy to find someone discover this. Hyacinth 05:59, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)