E L PAN DE CADA DÍA

The structuring and performance of sound, in both linguistic and musical forms, is ubiquitous to human culture. Although manifest both historically and culturally in a myriad of particular forms, music, like language, has been recognised as a powerful constitutive force in the flux of human social-political relations and identifications. Historically, philosophical ruminations – from Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle through to the post-Enlightenment thought of Rousseau, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – have positioned music in a central but paradoxical role of oscillation between the antinomies of sacred and profane, sublime and abject, vice and virtue, mind and body, phenomenal and noumenal, good and evil, the borderlands that constitute the contested ground of ethics and the status of the human condition within the social-political matrix. In the period that marked the transition from the Renaissance into the age of Enlightenment, however, music-making underwent a metamorphosis that transformed what had formerly been a social practice of ritual, educative and ethical import, towards the advent of secular instrumental forms, the emergence of the individual virtuoso

performer, the conductor, and concert performance that dispersed and divided musical experience (Bowman, 1998). Such a move eventually elevated and fragmented Western

‘art music’ into the aspects of composition, performance, and the critical reception of an

informed listening audience. As a consequence, ‘music’ became increasingly defined as an autonomous aesthetic domain under the general academic umbrella of ‘the arts’, and

the emphasis of musicological scholarship predominantly shifted towards the critical

analysis of the composition, performance and reception of music as ‘art object’.

Although music as performance practice also resides within the academy, there remains a significant divide between the field of musicological scholarship and what might be

termed vocational and ‘lay’ practices of the broad spectrum of the musical arts.

Restricted to the narrow definition of Western ‘art music’, academic music

scholarship has, for the most part, remained an autonomous field confined within its own textual musicological terms, and reluctant to acknowledge the relevance of any

investigation from alternative perspectives. Moreover, until comparatively recently, both traditional and popular forms of music-making have been occluded from serious

consideration. As expatriate New Zealand composer and music educator Christopher Small (1998, pp.3-4) suggests, it is only those of ‘brave spirit’ who risk the wrath of the

musicological establishment and dare to disturb the highly valorised view of music as autonomous art. Recent scholarship – across domains as diverse as sociology,

psychology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience and economics – suggests, however, that music-making is an intriguing medium through which we might grasp a kaleidoscope of alternative perspectives regarding human identity and subjectivity (constituted through the flux of social relationships).

Any attempt to create a theoretical amalgam across such an eclectic spectrum of disparate perspectives inevitably risks a collapse into a banal and impotent synthesis that masks the complexity of the domain. However, if ‘music’ is understood as a

performative and creative trans-subjective act of structuring sound – both within and beyond the strictures of linguistic meaning – then enquiry may be extended beyond the mainstream musicological emphasis on music as aesthetic ‘art object’. Moreover, its

temporal unfolding in the present moment of performance bears a greater affinity with poetry and speech rather than artistic practices that focus on the production of a material art object. As Jacques Attali (1985) aptly summarises: ‘Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world’ (p.4). Attali further contends that music

shapes and speaks of social identities: ‘More than colours and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies …. All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community’ (p. 6). Moreover, its uses and meanings are inescapably political. Music is ‘an attribute of religious and political power [which] … signifie[s] order, but also … prefigure[s] subversion[italics added]’

(p.4).

Insofar as musical performance may be conceived as a modality of

communicative expression through which social identities are formed and consolidated, Attali also asserts that it possesses the paradoxical capacity to create and transform. Rather than perceiving music as an autonomous ‘art object’ to be analysed in terms of its

production, performance and reception, this thesis seeks to investigate the dynamic motivating force that underlies the human compulsion to incessantly represent and signify through the process of the performance of sound, a drive that is common to both

music and language. The performance of sound, structured in the modalities of music and speech, represents a complex matrix of cognitive, affective, and physical activity that is implicated in the formation of the human psyche. Perceived in this manner, the corporeal and embodied aspects of sound and the semiotic and prosodic dimensions of language cannot be annexed from structural theories of communication. There remains a compelling invocation that incites humans into expression through sound, and the

metamorphosis of this force into a ‘communicative’ act that seeks meaning underpins

what may broadly be termed the spectrum of social-political discursive practices. Musical practices are ubiquitous within social-cultural life and can be

demonstrated to share elements that are structurally isomorphic with those of speech and language in addition to a shared temporal articulation. Moreover, in many cases they are combined with each domain serving to enhance the other in terms of their respective Symbolic and Imaginary components. Aspects of psychoanalytic clinical practice such as the transference relation, repetition, free association and interpretation are also aspects of musical practice. The musical modes of repetition, interpretation, improvisation and composition offer a unique grasp of the Lacanian modus operandi. Given this affinity, and that psychoanalysis has been increasingly utilised as an analytic tool to interrogate and elucidate the complex configurations of social interaction through institutions and practices, it is surprising that it has not been brought into confluence with the field of musical performance to any significant degree. Thus considered, musical practices offer a uniquely salient temporal model through which Lacanian psychoanalysis might be further interrogated.Before the discussion moves to the specific detail of the confluence of Lacanian theory and musical practices that this thesis will pursue, a general

discussion about the absence of music in psychoanalytic thought, and a survey of the small body of extant literature that applies psychoanalysis to the field of music will serve to further circumscribe the gap in psychoanalytic theory that this thesis will address.