I spent a poor night sleeping after staying up too late jailbreaking and unlocking my iPhone so I can use it in France. For the record, I was successful—or at least, I appear to have been successful; I have to wait until I have a European SIM card to try out to be sure. But the iPhone still works, so that’s something. For a brief while yesterday morning, I thought I had “bricked” it (this is an odd locution, by the way, for something the size of a deck of playing cards and that weighs even less—not only is a dead iPhone nothing like a brick, it’s barely even a paperweight).

So when I woke up early, like I always do after a poor night’s sleep, I went back to what I’d been reading the day before, Lawrence Kramer’s Why Classical Music Still Matters. I’ll mention that Kramer is a professor of English and Music at Fordham, and he’s written quite a bit on music and obviously knows it and loves it. But what I’ve read so far hasn’t impressed me.

I’ll skip the opening chapter—it’s harder to say what’s wrong with it because it rests on very vague and abstract claims about classical music (“the gift of classical music is listening itself… This music gives subjectivity ears.”). He does insist that he is not going to sell either “music appreciation” (just learn a little about the sonata form, and you’ll like it!) or musical elitism (“listen to the greatest musical minds of the west”). He also insists that readers won’t need to know anything about music (but then says, discussion Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” that “the bassoon voice sounds on two instruments when acoustically necessary, but it is always single”—I’m guessing few non-musicians will understand this, or talk about dominants, tonics and the like). But I wanted to talk about melody, which is where the actual content of the book begins.

“We can begin by listening closely to some exceptionally beautiful music…” he writes: “the Brahms Clarinet Quintet (1891) begins with a consummation…” I stopped here, and downloaded the Clarinet Quintet, cause I’m just that sort of close reader. I started listening to it while I was reading. Kramer’s main point is that the melody expresses a longing and a lack of fulfillment that he wants to argue is absolutely typical of melody itself. As he notes, after the “perfectly blissful” “lustrous shimmer” of the opening notes, “there is no place to go but down,” a metaphor he finds literalized in the downward movement of the melody itself.

Interesting. Except that the melody then begins working its way back upward. That sort of thing makes me suspicious. And then I ask awkward, close-reader questions like “what’s at stake in making melody always about loss and unfulfillment? Well, “to enjoy a melody, we need to be able to hear it more than once…” but it also vanishes “in the act of being made.” Sound familiar? Essentially, Kramer trots out Derrida’s argument about iterability (a signature, or a melody, is not recognizable as such until it is—at least in principle—repeatable, demonstrating the presence of a signing intention—but the very iterability makes the signature potentially counterfeit, the presence disappearing). He wants to suggest that there is a paradox in melody itself: melody makes a promise, suggests a future, stages a drama, that it never completely fulfills. This aporia of fulfillment and longing is what typifies classical music for Kramer. (Don’t ask me why the melodies of jazz or pop or rock don’t do this, by the way—they don’t. Only classical music melodies have this power.)

Apart from the apparent elitism of this claim, it sounds like an interesting argument at least. And it should sound very familiar. Here’s Kramer again on the melody at the start of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet:

The passage is presented at the precise moment of its loss. Almost before it can be enjoyed, it becomes the unattainable object of a desire that is the more acute for having once been satisfied.

Hmmm. An unattainable object of desire that serves to provoke desire, block it and prolong it all at the same time? Satisfaction that is a lack of satisfaction? Where have I heard that before? Is this Quintet perhaps in the key of objet petit (a) minor? Perhaps. That’s a pretty amazing opening passage, isn’t it (and it really is very beautiful, although Brahms isn’t quite my thing). What gives this opening line its theoretical power, what allows Kramer to make these claims for how the passage represents all melody in its always already broken promises, is the fact that “the opening moment of fulfillment is never heard again. It is detached from the rest of the movement to dwell apart in a sphere of its own.” This perfect melody makes a promise to return, but never does, and hence “it is presented at the precise moment of its loss,” etc., etc.

You already know where this is going. And Kramer has to temporize: the opening melody never repeats “except in the purely formal repeat of the whole first section.” Now Derrida would have a field day with that “purely formal,” wouldn’t he? Look, it either repeats or it doesn’t. And it does. So it isn’t presented in the precise moment of its loss. And it isn’t an unattainable object of desire, because it comes back and is enjoyed again (“purely formally,” I guess, but I like formality—in my dress, and in my music!).

But I was willing to give Kramer his “purely formally” and play along for a while. And say, okay, maybe the “purely formal” repetition doesn’t count (although I have to wonder: is there any other kind of repetition? When is repetition informal? When it arrives wearing jeans?). But I’m still reading and listening—and keep in mind, this is my first time hearing this particular piece of music—and I hear the “purely formal” repetition at 9:15. I’m still reading, the piece is still developing, and then I hear it again! At 12:10! To conclude the first movement. I’ll give you one “purely formal” repetition, but not two.

Eleven pages after his claim that the opening moment is “never heard again,” he says it “almost returns again.” I’m not buying—this is a travesty of close reading in the service of theory. The text does not support your reading. First it never returns. Then it returns, but “purely formally.” And then it returns again, but “almost,” because it doesn’t recapitulate it all—only the “perfectly blissful” “lustrous shimmer” of the opening notes.