The introduction to Holly Watkins's new book on metaphor and German thought moves superficially over an important problem in these ‘post-theory’ years – the problem of conflating autonomy with the metaphor of depth. That is to say, we think deep thoughts about Beethoven's late works because they possess an unprecedented degree of depth, and both deep thoughts and deep music are autonomous. The problem lies here in confusing an attribute of subjective thought – deep, rich, fertile and seemingly autonomous thoughts – with a specific quality of style, a quality that can only be ascertained by appeal to musical subjectivity. Beethoven's late style has been received as deep and rich. As a thing in its own right, autonomous, it has given rise to deep thoughts. But the two, style and thought, are not necessarily dependent. Deep thoughts are elicited by both superficial and profound music, and deep music has elicited its fair share of superficial thought.

Ostensibly a wide-ranging theoretical framework cast in the shape of a literature review, the introduction gives Watkins a vehicle by which to enunciate a stance on this problem. Watkins's distinctive voice emerges midway, in reference to work by Lawrence Kramer: ‘Depth does indeed constitute a core component of that shifting collection of practices, values, and experiences that Kramer calls “modern subjectivity”, but it was hardly a monolithic or unchanging concept’ (p. 5). Watkins aims to correct the tendency to conflate historical subjectivities (let us say, those of A.B. Marx) with present day theories of subjectivity (those of Kramer, Susan McClary and Stephen Rumph). She suggests that Romantic antecedents are far more complex than the cardboard portrait of subjectivity invoked in our day. That cardboard portrait was produced and is reproduced under the aegis of ‘music theory's post-war emulation of the sciences’ (p. 5), which dispensed of Romanticism as a luxury. We note the tendency in Milton Babbitt's writings on set theories, for example. In doing so, however, music theory succumbed to that most Romantic of notions, the absolute object.

Unfortunately, Watkins breaks off just as she appears to be getting started on deconstructing this straw man rooted in our theoretical past. Her review of Rumph's work on deep structure leads her into Carl Dahlhaus and Robert Hatten. She shows, albeit briefly, what the issue of depth has produced in the conflict between New Musicology and its predecessor. As a bastion of the latter and target of the former, depth is a mere shadow, a ‘simulacra of deep subjectivity’, rather than ‘the formalized equivalent of Romantic inwardness’ (p. 8).

Presumably this cardboard cameo has proven a liability to musicology both New and old – collateral damage in the culture wars. Watkins does not pursue this point but turns to the task of elaborating metaphor by citing theorists such as Marion Guck and the ubiquitous Lakoff and Johnson. I wish she had continued her critique even just a little further in her introduction. I suspect that in its attempt at carving out a toehold in musical academia, the New Musicology erected more than its fair share of cardboard straw men – the depth monster among them. To this coterie, old musicology responded with justified horror, and its own army of phantoms.Footnote ¹ Watkins could have sent a few more of these wraiths, old and New, to their resting places, but that is not her task here. She does continue this project from time to time, however – qualifying, for instance, the putative ‘cognitive’ nature of Lakoff and Johnson's metaphors as not autonomously constitutive of thought.

Watkins's study is contextual, an assay of the ground upon which the depth metaphor erected itself in Germany in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. But her ultimate goal is polemical – taking up passim the thread quit lamentably several pages before. She aims to ‘[inoculate] critical inquiry against the lingering desire to “fix” musical meaning in a transhistorical and transcultural no-man's land’ (p. 19). Although this inoculation is aimed primarily at a form of ‘internalist’ criticism, I suspect she is catholic in this regard, and would condemn the critical internalisms of the New Musicologists too, the predilection for contextualism at the expense of deep analysis.

Her method is eclectic, as she puts it: ‘cultural history, hermeneutics, “explication,” and musical analysis cross and overlap’ (p. 20). The study will take place on the ‘surface’, in plain sight. (The irony posed by a ‘surface’ study of the depth metaphor is not noted.) She cites Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison on the scientific objectivity of the surface: ‘Superficiality is, in a certain sense, exactly the point. … We reject the metaphorical (and metaphysical) reflex that, without further justification, prefers excavation to enlargement as a privileged method of understanding’ (p. 21).Footnote ²

I get slightly uncomfortable here, since the same confusion seems to be at play between the attributes of a thing (‘the surface of things’) and the quality of thought (‘conjectured depth’). Perhaps the best tactic for reading Watkins is indeed the superficial – to cruise the surface of the considerable terrain she covers, noting features, enjoying vistas. The only problem lies in the fact that this terrain is filled with abandoned mineshafts (her metaphor, borrowed from Novalis).

Watkins has done particularly well to resist these gravities – looming as they do in the very nature of the subject matter. But if the faults of Kramer, McClary, Rumph, Spitzer and company have been to misrepresent the full dimension of the depth metaphor, then this is not a problem of metaphor, merely a problem of method, an incapacity to apply deep thought. Thus, I disagree with Daston and Galison, who seem to follow the post-theoretical trajectory of recent years and reject deep theorizing. There is no need, however, to take up in music what has become the rejection of theory – post-theory – elsewhere.

The book is a set of essays exploring traces of depth in music and thought about music. The latter five of the book's six chapters are devoted to theorists or composer-theorists: A.B. Marx, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg. The first chapter addresses the roots of modern German notions of depth. Watkins makes a rapid tour of the early nineteenth-century's fascination with the subject, beginning with the aforementioned Novalis (a novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, of 1800) and ending with a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘The Mines at Falun’ (‘Die Bergwerke zu Falun’) of 1819, ultimately a cautionary tale about the seductions of inner depth. The problem cited above looms again all too briefly to conclude the chapter: ‘The difficulty Hoffmann faced in determining where “music itself” passes over into the contingencies of reception has since become one of the deepest dilemmas of music scholarship – meaning one that will likely never be resolved’ (p. 50).

The second chapter takes up one member of the ever-fascinating nineteenth-century family of Marx Brüder – Adolf Bernhard in this instance – whose forays into cognition anticipate the brothers Lakoff and Johnson by a century and a half. Central here is the notion of depth as a national characteristic – Teutonic ostensibly. Fichte and Herbart appear as well, but the spirit is that of A.B. Marx the national cognitivist.

The third chapter is devoted to Schumann, but here again the polemic resurfaces: ‘The problem here is that the modern theoretical understanding of music as a structure isolable from the experiences which gave rise to it and in turn are caused by it is at odds with the association- and analogy-happy outlook of Romanticism … and the free mixture of sensations and ideas in Schumann's creative process. Syntactical studies of musical metaphor, by contrast, treat music essentially as a closed system’ (p. 105). And thereafter she resumes her critique of Hatten and Spitzer, preferring instead the late John Daverio and Hans Joachim Köhler, and in conclusion, a brief evocation of Derrida. The essence of the chapter seems to prove her initial point, that metaphor in Schumann is a subtle thing, not to be exhausted by tussles with straw men.

The fourth chapter attempts a rapprochement with Wagner. The meeting ground is what Watkins calls ‘time depth’, a sense of time extended across great spans of drama – ‘echoes of the past and intimations of the future overlap in the present moment of the drama’ (p. 121). (I think she might be accused of confusing metaphors, principally time with Romantic space as expressed in the Wordsworthian vista.) I draw attention to her treatment of Wagner and harmony in which time depth is perhaps best illustrated, because harmony will be the subject matter of the next chapter. Notable as well are a brief evocation of Carl Gustav Carus, a largely forgotten contemporary of Wagner whose notion of psychic depth is prescient, and an extended motivic analysis of the scene in Die Walküre where Siegmund and Sieglinde first meet, as an example of time depth.

The fifth chapter is an all too rare treatment of Schenker as intellectual history. Reading her account, I find slightly more tractable Schenker's evocation of a Germanic genius in music. It was in the air (even Schoenberg succumbed to it). I find still intractable, however, the confusion of space and time in Schenker's thought. Her response to Schenker's thought is convincing, not simply by her application of Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space,Footnote ³ with its Marxist framework, but by the reappearance of the problem noted earlier, now in combination with Lefebvre:

Watkins is pointing to that shibboleth of post-structural thought called the Unheimlich, the uncanny or literally the un-homely, as it appears in Schenker's mind. Think of this as the disconnect between on the one hand the Romantic absolute and on the other the New Critical or empiricist absolute in his graphic studies and in particular their reception in America. Citing Lefebvre, she speaks of the analytic undertaking as ‘repressive in a peculiarly artful way: not a bad description of Schenkerian analysis and the kind of listening it sponsors’ (p. 184).

Most English-language treatments of the relationship between Adolf Loos and Schoenberg are the literal equivalent of traipsing through Vienna from the Schoenberg Centre to the Café Museum – Heimlich. This is not the case with Watkins. Her final chapter, ostensibly devoted to Schoenberg, takes as its subject the modernization of the depth metaphor – ‘showing how twelve-tone music exhibits a Loosian commitment to privacy and interiority … a new perspective on that music as an aesthetic expression of urban (counter-) culture’ (p. 195). To do so, she invokes the sociologist Georg Simmel and the new psychic reality of self-preservation and of shielding the self – a new psychic dimension of depth. This is particularly astute as a link between the interiors of Loos and of Schoenberg – the illusion of psychic depth created in their respective work. And it yields a refreshing view of Schoenberg's music, which has been bludgeoned by more than its fair share of organicist mining. She evokes the thought of Siegfried Giedion that modernity is many sided. Her appraisal of the post-modernity, if it doesn't return us to the problem articulated at the beginning of this review, draws the one dimensional nature of much discourse about the depth metaphor into clear relief:

This would seem to be one of the many strengths of Watkins's book, the ability to turn thoughts gleaned from other writers – Giedion in this instance – to new insight. Combined with a running skirmish involving the New and old in musicology, this feature makes it indispensible to the modern reader.

The book is nicely presented, with careful observation of detail. The bibliography, in welcome division between primary and secondary sources, includes names that readers of musicology will find unfamiliar – notably Simmel, a sociologist whose anti-positivist influence was palpable on the field of sociological criticism (this including Adorno). The long nineteenth century provides several lesser known thinkers: Carus (on the psyche and soul), Joseph Mainzer (music and Volk), Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Carl Seidel (tonality), Gerhard Tersteegen (the inner soul), and Anton Thibaut (tonality), amidst better known thinkers such as Fichte, Herbart, Herder, Jean Paul [Richter], Michaelis, Schelling, Schlegel, Tieck and Wolzogen. The breadth of the secondary sources cited attests to the scope of Watkins's study – naturally many texts on nineteenth-century music, but (assaying merely up to the letter B) a wealth of citations to philosophers (M.H. Abrams, Adorno, Bachelard, Barthes, Benjamin, Marshall Berman, Andrew Bowie) and social historians such as Benedict Anderson and Katherine Arens. Curiously, she seems to have omitted her own work from the bibliography. The index, however, is both generous and judicious.