The chapter explores how singing destabilizes and re-establishes connections between sound, reference and reality. Three examples are examined: the aria Un’aura amorosa from Mozart’s Così fan tutte, the last song from Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, In diesem Wetter, and the singing of the consecrating statement “This is my body, this is my blood” in the liturgy of the Eucharist in the Christian mass. The argument in the chapter is twofold. First, to sing “This is” pluralizes what “This is” refers to in the musical event. When sung, the statement can become a critique of the context, logic and values from which it originates, i.e., Christianity and atonement as a fundamental premise in Western notions of reality and social regulation, and instead the statement can be an effort to articulate how this reality ought to be. Second, to sing “This is” can be a critique against notions of musical immanence which regard sound as a realm of meaning entirely of its own. The referring event of the Eucharist exposes the limited adequacy in believing music to be a free form of artistic expression and critique of society and religion. Rather, singing “This is” might disclose how notions of immanent musical reality are just as confined, self-consuming, and meaningless as the criticized immanent logic of Christianity and atonement. The referring event of the sung “This is” might reveal how all music has referential, relational, and transcendental, i.e., liturgical characteristics.
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