Music, Subjectivity, and Schumann

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Defining Subjectivity. The title invites hubris. How does one attempt to define such an all-pervasive yet hopelessly nebulous notion? Frustratingly polysemous in its application, subjectivity is one of the most popular and yet at the same time obscurest terms in the modern human sciences. Not without justification does one of the most valuable previous musicological accounts of the topic disclaim any direct approach to this question, insofar as subjectivity, in the author's view, escapes definition by its very nature. The difficulty arises in part as subjectivity appears not to be a single thing. Neither is it, at least by some accounts, reducible to a group of things. Slightly more securely subjectivity might be argued to be a relation between things. But it is one where its apparent basis - the subject or self - is itself hotly disputed, even denied by some commentators. And then, even after coming to some provisional answer to all of these concerns, how do we begin to relate this concept to music, which similarly appears to elude all verbal confinement? Faced with this state of affairs one might be forgiven for dismissing the whole topic as yet another musicological example of conceptual diffuseness, humanistic hermeneutics at its idlest and most fuzzy"--