Naomi Cumming
Rev'd Dr Evan Burge
Naomi was 38 when she died in Brisbane on 6 January 1999. She was about to begin as a lecturer in music at the University of Queensland, and was excited at the prospect. Her sudden death was, of course, a terrible shock to her husband Anthony, to her family, and to all who knew and loved her. To know her was to love her.
I loved and admired her, for her music, her penetrating mind, her Christian faith, and above all for the loving, accepting, and forgiving person she was. When I first knew her as a young teenager, she had a shy and somewhat ethereal air about her, and also a gentle beauty. Later, I became aware of her courage, her tenacity, her worldly knowledge as well as her spiritual insight, and her lively humour. Sometimes she could appear naive and innocent, but her vision was unclouded.
In due course, she fell in love, a necessary condition, her teacher had said, for becoming a great artist. She and Anthony were married in February 1983. This always meant a great deal to her. She also knew grief, above all, the grief of a miscarriage after many years of yearning to have a child. In crystalline prose she wrote of this in two articles published in 1997, analytically in “A task of grief” and more personally in “Grief unconceived”. She could express with accurate simplicity the most profound and intimate experiences.
On Naomi's coffin were placed symbolic objects. They included her wedding ring, her prayer book, the manuscript of The Sonic Self, being launched as a book today, and her violin. As Anthony has said, when she played the angels sang. She loved playing the violin. Her music came from deep within her. Yet she did not become a concert violinist because of the physical strain of excessive hours of practice. In compensation came the liberation of her powerful and penetrating intellect.
Soon after completing her, doctorate in music theory at the University of Melbourne in
1987, Naomi became recognised as a scholar of international standing. She was in
demand for papers and lectures in major world centres, and maintained a wide network of
distinguished correspondents by e-mail. A knowledge of German became essential and
Naomi soon acquired it. She never tried to push her own claims. Others were attracted to
her. The list of her published papers is remarkable for its length and the wide range of
music and ideas it covers. In 1996 when she was a research fellow in music at this
University she was invited to join the Department of Philosophy, such was her ability at
lucid analysis.
Professor Malcolm Gillies will speak about the distinguished analytical work he is about to launch. We will never again hear the aria “Erbarme dich” from the St Matthew Passion without thinking of Naomi. Her violin is being sold but its music will not cease. Another musician will soon use it to create beautiful sounds. But through the Naomi Cumming Foundation, created through the sale of this precious instrument, its music will also sing in the lives of talented young people. ... She could have no more fitting and enduring memorial.
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Launch of Naomi Cumming's The Sonic Self and of the Naomi Helen Cumming Foundation
Malcolm Gillies
Ladies and Gentlemen, Fellow Musicologists, friends of Naomi and Anthony. The aria, “Erbarme Dich”, from Bach's St Matthew Passion, was the subject of one of Naomi Cumming's most brilliant articles. Published in the British journal Music Analysis, it was, just two months before her death, awarded the (American) Society for Music Theory's “Outstanding Publication” award. The prize encomium read:
The Subjectivities of “Erbarme Dich” is a groundbreaking article on subjectivity and its consequence for our understanding of expressive meaning in music. Drawing on current approaches to ‘voice’, gesture. and agency in music. Cumming integrates semiotic, aesthetic, Schenkerian, and theological insights into the various subjectivities projected by Bach's celebrated Passion aria. Profound in its philosophical investigations, and wide-ranging in its analytical claims, the article presents one of the most comprehensive accounts of how we interpret and, at times, identify with implied subjectivities in both vocal and instrumental music.
The first paragraph of that article approaches the topic of subjectivities in a disarmingly simple way. Immediately, Naomi identifies both as an Australian and as a Christian -- the latter. at least, being most important to her study. She began:
“At 3.00pm on Good Friday, 1995. a small group of people gathered in an Anglican church in Melbourne to meditate. As they listened to the “Erbarme Dich” aria from Bach's St Matthew Passion, some were visibly moved, and in recalling the event they spoke with a strange elation. Two years earlier I had been living in New York, and listened to the Passion repeatedly during Lent, alone in an apartment. I was similarly moved by this passage, at the moment of Peter's denial. my identification with the violin's melody perhaps being heightened by earlier experiences of playing the work in a student orchestra. It had been in 1981, in Tasmania. I was astounded by the melancholy beauty of my fellow-students' sound, to the point where it distracted me from my part. When Gerald English [the tenor] intoned the long melisma concluding the recitative, I could only guess vaguely that the German text spoke of Peter's weeping. yet even without fully comprehending its context I was rivetted by the poignancy of the violin's musical utterance. Now understanding the text, and standing within a continuing tradition of Christian practice, I cannot readily hear the work in a state of detachment and “aesthetic distance”, yet my experiences with it lead me to ask some questions about my own processes of identification. Why does the violin's introduction to the aria bring such involvement? Is the emotion of the moment really one that can be identified in the music, apart from holding a position of Christian belief? What is it in the music that allows a personal, and emotionally-charged. form of identification to take place`? Why does the closure of the aria bring such satisfaction that it allows a new distancing, as if a painful emotion had been partially contained?”
This Music Analysis article of 1997 was a herald of The Sonic Self, the publication of which we celebrate this evening. For The Sonic Self grapples even more impressively and comprehensively with those aspects of subjectivity which had interested Naomi over the last twenty years. in fact ever since her earliest days as a postgraduate student here at The University of Melbourne. Then she was concerned with Leonard B. Meyer's Emotion and Meaning in Music, and other leading texts of music aesthetics and analysis. By the mid-1990s her concerns could be summed up in her own uniquely turned question: “Does the Self Form the Sound, or the Sound the Self?” And Naomi answered that ultimately unanswerable question from the widest of experiences. Not for her the dry, escapist detachment of positivistic analysis -- no -for Naomi had been required. through her early learning of the violin to go beyond the cognitive realm, indeed, “to emote”. Although the injunctions of an early violin teacher taught her the superficial equation that "to emote" meant use “more vibrato!&$148; (p. 3), she came to realize that behind those injunctions lay less easily achieved expectations, and questions often taboo in the antipodean music studio: the musician's true voice, the body, the woman's body, the woman violinist's relationship to her voice and her body. Naomi's own violin, a Joseph and Antonius Gagliano instrument of 1795. the sale of which will form the basis of the Naomi Helen Cumming Foundation, even features in her account: “When I began to play it”, she wrote, “the sound of this new violin seemed to draw from me something I did not know I possessed. It was as if the violin had the potential to become the voice I lacked.”
The Sonic Self.- Musical Subjectivity and Signification centres upon subjectivities experienced -as Naomi so precisely defines --“in music and by musicians of the Western European Classical tradition” (p. 9). And her repertory base is solo works for the violin. that instrument of hers which comes closest to the voice, which (to quote one of Naomi's footnotes) “is one of the most primitive, most spontaneous, impulses of all human beings”.
The Sonic Self leads from those multivarious and inchoate feelings which musicians and music-lovers inevitably experience, through a probing of reactions -Naomi's reactions -- through further to a rationalisation based upon her own unique blend of musical semiotics and musical pragmatism. The track of this book, then, is nothing other than the unfolding of Naomi as theorist and performer. as thinker and doer, in short. as the integrated sonic personality which most good musicians are. That is what is so alluring about this book. that it attempts ultimately to confront head-on, and not through tedious analogies and allusions, the most visceral of all musical question: why music moves us? The affect of music is universally recognized, but its effects are intensely individual. Naomi has opened the Pandora's box of those subjectivities, which most of us have not even the basic skills to articulate but know we experience. Now, such an essay is not all plain sailing, and Chapter Seven, dauntingly entitled “Complex Syntheses”, is certainly not for the terminologically faint-of-heart. But its complexities are only in measure to the depth of Naomi's questions, and its conclusion is, in fact, fairly simple: that feeling in music is greater than the sum of any particular collection of musical signs, or, as Naomi suggests “a synthesis of various kinds of musical signs could yield a complex affect that was not reducible to any of them, but a product of a unique contextual synthesis”.
The Sonic Self contains many beautiful vignettes, and telling asides. One delicious moment is a Platonic-style dialogue between a skeptic and her respondent. The moral of the exchange is that uncertainty born of an inability to decide -- what the skeptic calls “self-indulgence” -is preferable to certainty born of inappropriate or naive belief. Another immensely powerful insight into Naomi's stance is found in the final paragraph of Chapter One. part of a section entitled “Losing and Finding the Self Once More”. Again her theme is uncertainty:
What is it. really. that you are losing when you take the risk of an act whose outcome is uncertain? Can you really be losing your ‘self’ if your selfhood is formed in activity? If you are constituted in your acts, your performances, you are per-forming yourself through them. Your “self“ will appear in the act. You do not yet know fully who you are, but will discover yourself in the action of taking risk. as I discover -- or perform -- myself in taking the risk of writing this. The cost of creating new meanings is only the risk of "losing" the self if that selfhood is imagined as a static thing. (p. 42).
The Sonic Self is about bridging gaps. Naomi herself muses near the start of the book about that London underground command to “Mind the Gap!” (p. 9): “[The announcer] could have been a prophet of fundamental ontology”. she writes. “How can you name that place between intention and ‘sensible’ form? How can you name that spot where you would like your illuminating presence to be seen, when your appearance attracts nothing but a transparent stare? How can you name the terror of a dream when you think you sing, but no sound will come from your violin? How do you ‘mind the gap’ you cannot find?” Robert S. Hatten in the book's Afterword talks of the gaps which he believes Naomi has helped to bridge through writing this book: between approaches of music aesthetics and music theory, between Peircean semiotics and perception/cognition theory. and ultimately between old and new musicologies, -all achieved through Naomi's effortless integration of stylistic and cultural perspectives.
Naomi's death in Brisbane, within days of arriving to take up a senior lectureship at The University of Queensland, was an unparalleled tragedy for Australian musicology, for one so bright had died so young. Yet, coming just at the conclusion of her Queen Elizabeth 11 Fellowship -- based in the Music, then the Philosophy. Departments here in Melbourne -- her death left a remarkably powerful and, even, tidy. legacy. The Sonic Self was all but complete. Thanks to the work of a small body of Naomi's North American supporters, principally David Lidov and Robert Wannamaker, it has now appeared in this most elegant edition from Indiana University Press. The New Grove Dictionary's second edition, published earlier this year, includes eight articles by Naomi, most importantly including an extended entry on musical semiotics. And recent publications have also seen her many other interests well represented in print: from looking at metaphor in Roger Scruton's aesthetics of music to Steve Reich's Different Trains, from Peter Sculthorpe's Mangrove to a response to the Piss Christ fracas here in Melbourne, which took her altogether outside the field of music, although not outside her intense interest in theology. Somehow, the deep foundations laid in music, psychology, philosophy and religion came together in her final years to produce a most compellingly individual form of liberal scholarship.
It gives me the greatest pleasure. then. to launch The Sonic Self, Naomi's sonic self, which through these covers can live on for coming generations.
The desire that Naomi might live on in the musicological mind and imagination was one of Anthony Cumming's chief purposes in establishing the Naomi Helen Cumming Foundation. “One of the greatest sadnesses that I feel about Naomi's repose”, Anthony wrote to me earlier this year. “is that her untimely death meant that there was the loss of the opportunity to directly pass on her knowledge to the new generation. Part of my intention in forming the foundation is to encourage young academics in their musicological pursuits.”
And Heavens knows just with what difficulty. and with what dedication. those studies are now carried out. In an age sometimes indifferent to traditional arts, ever mindful of immediate commercial opportunities -- not to mention insufficiently respectful to the virtues of our Australian dollar -- the Fellowships of the Foundation will be a boon to scholars of postdoctoral standing in three fields which Naomi influenced: systematic, historical and ethno-musicologies. Naomi herself knew how difficult it was to sustain her intense academic interests in that period after the award of her PhD. Despite her string of prestigious Rothmans, Fulbright and QEII Fellowships. there were those gaps and cracks in her progression when the next step could not be guaranteed. These Fellowships will help to ensure that fewer of our brightest musicological scholars will in future need to “Mind the Gap!”.
Anthony Cumming has eloquently outlined the details and purposes of the Foundation. so it remains for me now simply to exhort you to invest through the Foundation in the future of musicology and formally to launch the Naomi Helen Cumming Foundation.
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