Amy Bauer

Music is a site of dangerous enjoyment beyond the signifier, to be reined in by law, commerce and custom, lest it undermine the social fabric and threaten “the ontological order”, as Mladen Dolar notes. Yet the most effective enforcement of music’s power comes from inside the citadel: from the discipline of music theory, ever ready to police the boundaries of what constitutes music and its proper expression. Žižek’s many ruminations on music stress its recurrent role as a bearer of a truth beyond words, an answer of the Real to the Other, whose role in that capacity wanes only in modernity, the moment when, he surmises, music renounces the endeavour to provoke the answer of the Other. But modernity also marks that era when music theory as a prescriptive discipline loses its sway over the art it would control, and shifts mode into a descriptive, analytic register that might ex post facto contain and normalise a work that disturbs the tenuous sonic order. Hierarchical analytical methodologies such as Schenkerian analysis siphon off the power of those works through an act of translation: the irrational and excessive is justified and bound, plucked from one canon and set within another as a mere exemplar of a rational technique. But what if the very limits of music analysis – the vast differences between the map and its territory – are seen instead as evidence not of its reductive force, but of its extraordinary ability to penetrate the true depth of music in all its uncanny power? Conflicting analyses of Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger demonstrate music theory and analysis as less a limitation on music’s fecundity than its retroactive cause. The analytic fantasy intended to keep music’s excess at bay instead recreates it in a liminal place, as its uncanny double.