Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly? Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy: Why lov'st thou that which thou receiv'st not gladly, Or else receiv'st with pleasure thine annoy?
—Sonnet 8, ln. 1-4, Wm. Shakespeare
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen,
und freudenvollere.
(Oh friends, not these sounds! Let us instead strike up more pleasing and more joyful ones!)
—Friedrich von Schiller, as adapted by Ludwig von Beethoven, Symphony No. 9, IV. Finale
I harbor few doubts that the Greeks knew what they were doing when they had Orpheus descend into Hades to rescue Persephone; in many ways, a similar understanding of music is revealed in the Hebrew book of Samuel, when a youthful David plays an instrument to calm a choleric or demonized Saul. We too in our Age of Anxiety rely on our own white, orphean iBuds to keep us from glancing backward at our execrable and ponderous problems. Music has an ability to assist us in confronting the perplexities of life, and expands the topography by which we are able to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of our moment-to-moment existence. But, for all the cave's opening, we glance behind us; for all the serenade, we toss a javelin at the player; for all the music already given, we turn our own volume one notch louder.
Though I could explore what it is we lose when music is enjoyed in isolation, I want to instead focus on how we can make the rampancy of music of use to the composition classroom.
This is really Peter Elbow's purpose in his "The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization." Here, Elbow explores the modal differences between the spatial and temporal dimensions: texts belonging, physically, to the spatial dimension, yet experienced in the temporal one, and the resulting conflicts of shape and coherence.
Laura Micciche's "Emotion, Ethics, and Rhetorical Action" is more closely related to Elbow's argument than a cursory glance reveals. Her thesis is that "ethics and emotion are always intertwined and connected to rhetorical action" and that this subject "has gone largely under-explored in the rhetoric of composition studies" (164). I think particularly of Bartholomae's argument in "Inventing the University" and as summarized by Fleckenstein, and of how I disagree with his assessment of "I"-less texts. A brief study of music might enable us to explore the merits of Bartholomae's case (which will receive little attention here, as I've written about it elsewhere, here and here—as a white male, I didn't anticipate quoting my own writing so early in my PhD, but here we are), at least as "I"-lessness and form and coherence combine. I will leave a discussion of emotion and rhetorical action for the conclusion.
By directing our attention to tonality and then rhythm, Elbow highlights the "two questions" he believes music helps us see: though we "started with 'How is something structured or organized or shaped?' . . . music invites a slightly different question: 'How is it held together, bound, or made to cohere?'" (624). We desire the all-about-ness that Elbow hints is an impossibility in the temporal realm of music; he also demonstrates a tendency in some disciplines to approach the reading of articles from a "bird's eye view" (628-9). Now, whether coherence is an inherent quality of a text or an experienced quality in the reader, Elbow withholds. He goes on to criticize Colomb and Griffin's (630-2) argument that coherence is created by the reader. Elbow says he
emphasize[s] coherence as an experience in the reader. But I don't want to push that point too far; otherwise we're just blaming the victim/reader for not creating coherence in every text. Just because the experience is in the reader, that doesn't remove the need for features in the text to help create those experiences. Do we really want to settle for texts that only work for readers who are ideally prepare. (632, emphasis mine)
The solution, Elbow argues, is "dynamic cohesion and dynamic coherence [which] create the music of form" (633). Dyanmism is the dialectical influence—to use rude terms—of outline on content, and content on outline. As we think and consider the an essay we are composing, we must rethink our structure/outline, and this compels further change. Elbow presents two possible conclusions from his work, detailing that "conventional modes of organization work at clarity and predictability; [whereas] dynamic time-oriented modes work at energy. My argument is both/and, not either/or" (645).
Elbow clearly appreciates music from a scholarly understanding; the terms and comparisons he uses betray a familiarity with music theory that is unavailable to most as a paradigm. Perhaps, then, we can rely on Micciche's argument to bring Elbow to some sort of employable conclusion.
Micciche laments the "overshadow[ing]" of emotion within rhetorical studies (164), as emotion is equated with "unreason, chaos, and blurred judgment" (165). "The rhetoric of reason is, above all else, reasonable in method and content, uncontaminated by the prowling indecision and irrationality of emotion" (165). Method and content: these are the very qualities Elbow praises in his adulatory look at music, though he uses the words repetition and anticipation (635). But no one listens to music to count the number of G notes in a D♭minor composition. We listen to music to be moved, to experience an emotion that often demands action, even if that action is only a standing ovation. "Action requires more than reason and rational deliberation," Micciche argues (168). And this is true: look to Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C Major, written as a response to the Siege of Leningrad, but latter suppressed for being "anti-Stalinist" (which only made the piece more popular). The rhetoric of the music compelled both emotion and an ethic, a response. This, Micciche says, is because "emotions, like reasons, move people to judge, decide, and act in certain ways" (169).
These topics are important because we are all, in some ways, Orpheuses and Davids to our classrooms. We have been discussing the merits/demerits of playacting neutrality, of creating personas for our students to . . . what? Keep their resistance down?—This question has the possibility of creating a false dichotomy, one that Micciche also fears as "establish[ing] a disingenuous choice" when it comes to questions of language (173)—to alleviate some of the discomfort that comes with challenged paradigms?—"Adrienne Rich points out that change is always tied up with feelings" (176).
We cannot approach rhetoric or emotion in the way we now approach music, a thing that can be experienced, without any diminishing of its value, privately. The first listeners of Symphony No. 7 had already experienced everything that went into the music, but the music gave it form; they had learned to anticipate what would come next because they had lived lives that the rhetoric of the music employed. What rhetoric are our students living? What form, what method and content are we able to bring into the classroom to create "studios" in which they can play at repetition and anticipation? I argue that it is emotion, à la Micciche.
What cannot be overlooked or overstated is that rhetoric is a response to a situation, and our current rhetorical situation is unquestionably an emotional one. "Emotional training is a key component in learning who to objectify, respect, fear, love" (Micciche 176). These are a few of the notes that compose our modern orchestrations; if we strip away emotion from rhetoric, from asking the charged questions, from being angered or excited by a rhetorical situation, we lose the ability to anticipate the answers we receive. We lose the ability to take action. No one was ever logically persuaded to marriage, relationship, or parenthood; Pericles didn't persuade the Greeks through deductive logic. And it wasn't cerebral compulsion that drove Orpheus into Hades.
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