Thus general suspicions of aural presence need themselves to be resisted. Presence can be demonized for reasons that seem programmed, for not all those who argue for its worth are vulgar. And reflexive scorn for music's ineffability is equally contestable. Ignoring real music—the musical event—and scorning ineffability go hand in hand because they are interdependent. It is real music, music-as-performed, that engenders physical and spiritual conditions wherein sound might suggest multiple concrete meanings and associations, conflicting and interchangeable ones, or also none at all, doing something else entirely. Real music, the event itself, in encouraging or demanding the drastic, is what damps down the gnostic. And some florid antiarias to gnostic proscriptions against the drastic attitude are very much in order. Freeing oneself from the "devastating hegemony of the word" in experiencing performed music does not mean that the human subject has lapsed into sensual idiocy (MI, p. 140). Aesthetic pleasure, the apprehension of beauty, is not evil, nor is it just a hedonist consolation.59 Doubting that musical works spell out cultural data or simply mulling over the mysticism inherent in arguments that they do is not naturally appalling. Musical hermeneutics' most coercive aspect is exemplified in claims that acknowledging or valuing music's ineffability constitute, as Kramer has put it, a "destructive irrationalism" typical of those who "justify unspeakable things" (MM, p. 5). Note the slippage, which must not go unrebuked. Somehow, philosophers like Stanley Cavell, Lydia Goehr, and Naomi Cumming, who suggest (echoing Jankélévitch) that music's implications proliferate against discipline, or who point to performed music's presence as a promise of life, are suddenly out there with unnamed villains and unspeakable historical crimes. ⁶⁰

So, after being given pause, why not take intellectual pleasure from music not as a work but as an event? Why not disentangle some virtues from a situation wherein the words explaining music are these: doing this really fast is fun. Between the score as a script, the musical work as a virtual construct, and us, there lies a huge phenomenal explosion, a performance that demands effort and expense and recruits human participants, takes up time, and leaves people drained or tired or elated or relieved. Philosophical treatises, the Bible, novels, memoirs, paintings, poems, these texts (and even plays, consumed on paper) lack that really big middle term, that elephant in the room. Any argument that throws music's exceptional phenomenal existence into some convenient oubliette in order to get over distinctions and difficulties is made in bad faith.

Would attending to performances entirely damp down the gnostic, as my performance of the aria from Idomeneo seemed to suggest? No. The experience of musical performance is generous, above all in opera or music theater (indeed, all sung music), where verbal and visual aspects furnish a simultaneous ground under the sonic circus, the ground where these other strata shape one's sense of a music that cannot be detached from them. For this reason—but more important, to see what follows upon the resolve to speak of ephemera—I want to turn to three operatic performances, first to Laurie Anderson in her performance piece Happiness on 15 March 2002. That performance raised questions about secret knowledge—the object of hermeneutics—and its loss. And, with my second instance—two performances of Meistersinger in 2001—it suggests that a gnostic moment can arise in unexpected ways.

At one point in Happiness, Anderson put on eyeglasses with tiny built-in microphones, which amplified not her voice but the anatomical sounds made by her head. When she clicked her teeth together, there was a loud boom with no reverberation. It was an uncanny moment. Guided by earlier references to the World Trade Center's destruction, I marked that sound as a musical translation. The original of this translation was recorded in the Naudet brothers' documentary about the disaster, the sound of bodies hitting the ground from great heights. ⁶¹ No one who has seen the documentary forgets the sound, which the filmmakers chose not to censor or cut. Anderson imitated it. My secret knowledge of the hidden signified (because I had seen the documentary) is what triggered real terror at that moment in her performance.

We so often deal hermeneutically with the past and its artifacts, yet seldom do we reflect upon artifacts we have right now and what they will mean in the future. Here is a chance. Will some audience years hence see a pirate videotape of Happiness and hear the sound and, without the secret, find themselves perplexed? And, even if some spectator were told by a musicologist of the future what the historical reading of the sound should be, would he or she find that knowing no longer means what it did in 2002? That knowing means loss of the perhaps equally terrible aura the sound now engenders only as long as it remains undefined? The very fact of recording—as any future audience can experience this event that came into presence (to echo Gumbrecht) only via its repeatable surrogate—does that not alter a basic alchemy, making the event an artifact, handheld and under control, encouraging distance and reflection? Gnostic satisfactions can become pale. What may be left in Laurie Anderson's recorded sound is a remnant whose force approaches the force once predicated on a rare amalgam—live presence and secret knowledge—but do so precisely because the secret knowledge has been lost, as has what was once alive. To believe that original signification can become quasi-permanent, or to value nondetermination for the freedom that allows alternatives to arise and to exist? That is the choice when confronting artifacts from the past as well, and perhaps that choice depends on which loss is regretted more deeply.

Music's cryptographic sublimity is a contributing force in the clandestine mysticism that appears as a bystander in musical hermeneutics, just as music's ineffability is what allows musical hermeneutics to exist. Music is ineffable in allowing multiple potential meanings and demanding none in particular, above all in its material form as real music, the social event that has carnal effects. The state engendered by real music, the drastic state, is unintellectual and common, familiar in performers and music lovers and annoying nonmusicologists, and it has value. When we cannot stare such embarrassing possibilities in the face and find some sympathy for them, when we deny that certain events or states are impenetrable to gnostic habits, hence make them invisible and inaudible, we are vulnerable. For, denying mystery, the perplexing event, the reticence such things may engender, means being prey to something that comes to call at its nocturnal worst, as coercive mysticism and morbid grandiloquence.