Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music: New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis 113882433X, 9781138824331

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Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music

This book studies recent music in the western classical tradition, offering a critique of current analytical/theoretical approaches and p ­ roposing alternatives. The critique addresses the present fringe status of recent, music sometimes described as crossover, postmodern, post-classical, post-­minimalist, etc., and demonstrates that existing descriptive languages and analytical approaches do not provide adequate tools to address this music in positive and productive terms. Existing tools and concepts were developed primarily in the mid-twentieth century in tandem with the high modernist compositional aesthetic, and they have changed little since then. The aesthetics of music composition, on the other hand, have been in constant transformation. Lochhead proposes new ways to conceive musical works, their structurings of musical experience and time, and the procedures and goals of analytic close reading. These tools define investigative procedures that engage the multiple perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners, and that generate conceptual modes unique to each work. In action, they rebuild a conceptual, methodological, and experiential place for recent music. These new approaches are demonstrated in analyses of four pieces: Kaija Saariaho’s Lonh (1996), Sofia Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet (1987), Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet no. 2, Demons and Angels (2004–05), and Anna Clyne’s “Choke” (2004). This book defies the prediction of classical music’s death, and will be of interest to scholars and musicians of classical music, and those interested in music theory, musicology, and aural culture. Judy Lochhead is a theorist and musicologist whose work focuses on the most recent musical practices in North America and Europe, with particular emphasis on music of the western classical tradition. Her work builds upon concepts and methodologies of various post-philosophies with a particular emphasis on post-phenomenology. She teaches in the Music Department at Stony Brook University.

Routledge Studies in Music Theory

1 Music and Twentieth-Century Tonality Harmonic Progression Based on Modality and the Interval Cycles Paolo Susanni and Elliott Antokoletz 2 Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis Judy Lochhead

Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis

Judy Lochhead

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of Judy Lochhead to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lochhead, Judith Irene. Reconceiving structure in contemporary music : new tools in music theory and analysis / by Judy Lochhead. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in music theory ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Musical analysis. 2. Music—21st century—Analysis, appreciation. 3. Music—20th century—Analysis, appreciation. 4. Saariaho, Kaija. Lonh. 5. Gubaidulina, Sofia, 1931- Quartets, no. 2. violins (2), viola, cello, 6. Garrop, Stacy, 1969- Quartets, no. 2. violins (2), viola, cello, 7. Clyne, Anna. Choke. I. Title. MT140.L55 2015 781—dc23 2015004471 ISBN: 978-1-138-82433-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-74074-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To George, Christopher, and Danny—my musical muses

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Contents

List of Examples, Figures, and Tables Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xiii 1

Part I 1

“Modern” Music Analysis

17

2 What Is Musical Structure Anyway?

46

3

68

Music Analysis—Producing Knowledge

4 Reconceiving Structure: Investigating, Mapping, Speculating

85

Part II 5 Technê of Radiance: Kaija Saariaho’s Lonh (1996)

105

6 Difference and Identity: Sofia Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet (1987)

123

7 Incessance of Memory: Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet no. 2, Demons and Angels (2004–05)

147

8 Spiral Morphing: Emergence, Saturation, and Uncoiling in Anna Clyne’s Choke (2004)

163

Index

177

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List of Examples, Figures, and Tables

Examples 3.1 3.2 3.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1

7.2

8.1

Hans Thomalla, Albumblatt, excerpt.72 a) Instruction page b) First system, mm. 1–5 Eleanor Hovda, Lemniscates, First and Third systems. 73 Anna Clyne’s Steelworks, mm. 39–43. 75 Lonh, mm. 36–47, end of Prologue to beginning of Section I. 109 Comparison of Melodic Contours: Saariaho and Jaufré.  115 Melodic Structuring of Soprano Part by Section: Range, First and Last notes, Modal Collections. 115 “de loing” Motive: Statement and Transformations. 117 “Dieu Plat/Parra Jois” motive and transformations. 118 a) Section III, “Dieu Platz” (“Pleases God”) b) Section IV, “Parra Jois” (“Joy will surely appear to me”) Second String Quartet, Reh 1–2, mm. 1–6 123 Second String Quartet, “Reaching Out” 129 gestures in Violin I and Cello, Reh 5–9, mm. 15–21. Second String Quartet, Part 2, Reh 21, mm. 44–50, Reaching Up and Renewing, Three Event-types of the 136 Mosaic Design. Second String Quartet, Part 2, mm. 65–67 and 86–87, 139 “Renewing” gestures. Second String Quartet, Part 3, Reh. 36, mm. 123–26, 141 Affirmation, Alternating Sonorities. Tarantella and Waltz Dance-like figures and the 148 “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” tune. a) Tarantella b) Waltz c) “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” tune Contour and Range Characteristics of the Waltz and Passing motives. 153 a) Waltz motives b) Passing motives Choke, Opening—Time 0:00-:38 (mm. 1–12). 164

x  List of Examples, Figures, and Tables Figures 5.1 Overall Form: Sections, Durations, and Timings. 107 5.2 Timbral Mapping: Timbral Types by Section. 112 5.3 Radiance: Moments of Luminance and Moments of Formal Flickering in the Electronics Part. 113 5.4 Interacting Planes—Luminance, Formal Flickering— 120 and Moments of Salience. 6.1 Overall Temporal Design of the Second String Quartet. 127 6.2 Second String Quartet, Part 1, Modes of Differing 130 in the Continuous G and Inflections of G Events. 6.3 Second String Quartet, Intervallic Differing in the 134 “Reaching Out” Gestures. 6.4 Second String Quartet, Part 1, Reaching Out and Tethering. 134 6.5 Second String Quartet, Part 2, Reh 22–25, mm. 45–67, ­Reaching Up and Renewing, Mosaic Design. 137 6.6 Second String Quartet, Part 2, Reh 21–34, Stages of 138 Reaching Up and Renewing. 6.7 Second String Quartet, Part 2, Reaching up and 140 Renewing: Processes of Differing. 6.8 (a) Second String Quartet, Part 3, Reh. 36, mm. 123–36, 142 (b) Affirmation, Durational Differing. 7.1 Overall Formal Design: Three sections and Figures, 149 Gestures, and Tune. 7.2 Detailed Formal Design: Agitated Dancing section. a) Tarantella—First subsection 151 b) Waltz subsection 152 c) Tarantella—Second subsection 154 d) Passing subsection 155 7.3 Detailed Formal Design: Nostalgic Remembering section. 158 7.4 Map of Obsessing Section. 159 8.1 Processes of Spiral Morphing: Emergence, Saturation, Uncoiling. 165 8.2 Schematic Mapping of the Baritone Sax and Tape Parts: 166 Time :00–2:08. 8.3 Mapping of Morphing Processes of Loop 1. 169 8.4 Mapping of Sound Things during Choke. 171 Tables 2.1 Quotations: Music. 2.2 Quotations: Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy. 5.1 Lonh, Two Musical Strands.

54 60 106

List of Examples, Figures, and Tables  xi 5.2 Lonh, Source poetry: Jaufré Rudel, “Lanqand li jorn son lonc en mai.” Text and Translation from Treitler 1992; differs slightly from Saariaho’s score. 5.3 Electronics Part: Categories and Codes for Timbral Types. 5.4 Soprano Melody: Beginning and Ending Pitches, Modal Stability, Range, and Highest Notes. 6.1 Second String Quartet, “Reaching Out” Gestures of Violin I and Cello. 8.1 Sound Things: Abbreviations and Descriptions for Figures 8.2 and 8.3. 8.2 Morphing Transformations in Loop 1. 8.3 Sound Things: Name, Time of Approximate First Occurrence, Abbreviation, and Description of Sound Properties.

108 110 116 133 167 170 172

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Acknowledgments

Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music exemplifies well the idea of emergent structuring that plays an important role in the analytical chapters. The ideas that shape the central themes of my project have intersected and collided in unforeseen ways, producing eventually the new approaches to conceiving structure I delineate here. I have given public lectures on all but two of the chapters of the book, and have benefited greatly from the discussions that followed those lectures. I am thankful to those who have offered their thoughts—this input proved invaluable as I shaped and reshaped this project. I have also benefited greatly from the exchanges I have had with colleagues at Stony Brook University, both in the Music and Philosophy departments. In the Philosophy Department, I am particularly grateful to Don Ihde and Edward Casey for their insights and encouragement. In the Music Department, the exacting rigor of my colleague Sarah Fuller has been a continuing inspiration. I also acknowledge the research support afforded me by the Department of Music under the helm of Perry Goldstein. Two research assistants, Hayley Roud and Michael Boerner, were invaluable in the latter stages of preparing the manuscript. I owe a great debt to the two of them. The Society for Music Theory has generously supported preparation of the examples and figures that play such a central role in my analytical chapters. My thanks go out to the Society, and to Michael Buchler and the other members of the Subvention Grant selection committee. The American Musicological Society has also provided a generous grant for the preparation of the examples and figures. I gratefully acknowledge the Lloyd Hibberd Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Another version of Chapter 6 is published as “‘Difference Inhabits ­Repetition: Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet No.2” in Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music from 1960–2000  edited by Parsons, Laurel & Ravenscroft, Brenda (2015) by permission of Oxford University Press, USA. There are several people in my everyday life that must be acknowledged for the sense of well-being and connectedness they shower upon me. These include two members of the staff at the Department of Music—Martha

xiv Acknowledgments Zadok and Monica Gentile. Their warmth and generosity make them friends of great depth. And, my two sons—Christopher and Danny—continue to challenge me to listen to new things, to hear beyond my own levels of comfort. Their love and support (“are you finished yet?”) have been great spurs to completion. Finally, and most significantly, I wish to thank George Fisher for his unwavering support and encouragement. Not only did he listen patiently to my ideas but also he read and commented on every chapter. His eagle eye for the weaknesses in my argument or prose was crucial to me as the project took its final shape. My debt to George is immense.

Introduction

The death-knell for classical music has been tolling relentlessly for nearly a century now. Despite signs to the contrary, the “death of classical music” is a myth of persistent fascination. Witness a 2012 exchange in the New York Times “Is Classical Music Dying?” in which most commentators agree that this centuries-old musical tradition is on life-support, and in a 2014 Slate article, Mark Vanhoenacker performed last rites in “Requiem: Classical Music in American Is Dead” (“Sunday Dialogue” 2012; Vanhoenacker 2014). The music conjured by the term “classical” in these contexts is “old music” composed by European composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, all of whom did indeed die long ago. Certainly a tradition of music that is only identified with performances of music created in the distant past is not long for this world. By contrast, witness these events: the Wet Ink Ensemble playing at Roulette in Brooklyn; wild Up performing at Echoplex in Los Angeles; or the Spektral Quartet performing at the Empty Bottle in Chicago; and you will instantly hear and see a lively musical scene that is dynamic, vibrant, and intertwined in the issues of the present. The audiences are diverse, the composers are there to interact with performers and audience members, and performers are often presenting a work for the first time. There is a palpable vitality to this scene. This music, its performers, and its listeners are the living present and future of the classical tradition in the twenty-first century. The death-of-classical-music myth persists despite the vibrancy of these events of contemporary music, and despite the presentation of old and new classical music in recital and concert halls throughout North America and Europe, and despite the fact that music retailers still include classical as one of their genre options. While the death of classical music is certainly exaggerated, it does make a good story and reminds us that things change.1 While its cultural prestige has dwindled when compared, for instance, to the 1930s, Western classical music still registers as one of the world’s great musical traditions that can shape the sonic imagination of listeners. But more often than not, it is European music of 1830 or 1730 that is evoked by the adjective classical. A somewhat more precise descriptive terminology defines this music as Romantic and Baroque; and it is these historical musics that are most often played in concerts, programmed in online radio stations,

2 Introduction and sold for portable playback. This emphasis on music of the past within the Western classical tradition is too frequently coupled with a near automatic rejection of recently created music. In the current cultural moment of music-making in North America and Western Europe, recent music has become a fringe phenomenon within the classical music tradition that in large part emphasizes masterworks of the past and that now stands as just one genre among many. This is a relatively recent phenomenon that contrasts sharply with the cultural prestige afforded composers and their music during their lifetimes—including such composers as Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, and Stravinsky, to name just a few of the most prominent. Despite the association of classical music with the past—a practice that some have referred to as a museum culture (Burkholder 1983)—there is an active and vital scene of music making within the classical tradition, a scene that defies the prediction of classical music’s death. The music of this scene is sometimes described as crossover, postmodern, post-classical, postminimalist, contemporary, and so on—the names of genres and sub-genres proliferating. While perhaps not well known if one conceives of audiences in terms of market-share, this recently created music has immense vitality and potential as music and as music of our time, engaging listeners with sounds that speak to our present situation. It is tempting to suggest that the persistent myth of classical music’s death is directly correlated with the tendency to associate classical music with masterworks of the past. But that correlation is too simple and does not speak to the broad array of musical, cultural, technological and intellectual changes that shape contemporary practices—the death myth is only a symptom of these larger cultural forces.2 Nonetheless, the potency of classical music as a living tradition depends on the active participation of creators, performers, and listeners in the present. Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music is about recently created music, the music of now that is the living and breathing life of the classical tradition. Reconceiving Structure begins with the claim that music created in “our time” situates listeners as feeling and thinking beings in the present and enacts in aural and sensuous terms the world in which we live now. As such it has a vital relevance to our current situation. But if my claim is true, why does this music still circulate on the fringes of the classical tradition? A full accounting for its fringe status would need to consider several facets: cultural changes brought about by globalization, new technologies for the preservation and distribution of music, new modes of musical structuring, new modes of musical performance, changing expectations about our critical engagements with music, and so forth. Here I focus on two facets—modes of structuring and critical engagements. Reconceiving Structure addresses the new modes of structuring that recently created works present in conjunction with our critical engagements with this music. Such critical engagements include not only linguistic descriptions and explanations and their related conceptual frameworks but also graphic modes depicting music’s expressive structuring of time. I claim

Introduction  3 that creators of recent music have been reconceiving the structuring of musical time, but the forms of critical engagement with this music have not fully kept pace with these changes. These new modes of musical structuring invite new modes of engaging music as temporally manifest sound, and response to this invitation—through the development of new modes of engagement— can play a productive role in generating new forms of experiential understanding. In other words, positive critical engagements can affect musical experience of recent music. My goal in Reconceiving Structure then is to delineate new modes of critical engagement with recently created music, a goal premised on the belief that these new tools will not only generate greater awareness of this repertoire but also shape a broader context in which to discuss, engage, and hence experience music of the present.3 I ground the project of Reconceiving Structure in the idea that what people write or say about music, how they graphically depict music’s sounding, or how they physically embody musical sound through bodily action—all such critical engagements affect how people experience music.4 While “sounding” is its operative expressive and communicative mode, music exists in a world of language, color and light, objects, tastes, movement, and so on. In other words, music exists in the lived world, shaping and absorbing that world through the broad range of embodied human experience. Conceived broadly, these critical engagements with music directly affect the way people encounter music across the musical activities of creating, performing, and listening. Since there has not been a robust critical response to the new modes of structuring in recent music, an important first step in my project is to query existing practices of critical engagements with music. For present purposes, I have chosen to focus on music analytical/theoretical writings about music since such work often establishes the fundamental terms employed by a wide range of authors. For instance, in a recent New York Times review of a performance of Dallapiccola’s Il Prigioniero, critic Anthony Tommasini writes: “…. there was a five-minute ovation for a 12-tone opera. Now there is a sentence I thought I would never write.” (Tommasini 2013) In this rather off-hand and basically positive statement, Tommasini equates the music of the opera with its compositional technique, revealing an assumption that 12-tone technique cannot produce music of wide audience appeal. Reconceiving Structure begins with this issue of how recent music is often equated with its compositional technique, demonstrating the historical circumstances of its origins. Reconceiving Structure has two parts. The first critiques practices of analysis and theory and their attendant concepts of musical structure, framing these practices and concepts as “modern.” This critique lays out the basic problems of addressing recent music, music for which existing analytical procedures and concepts of structure are not productive. Using observations from this critique, I propose some ways to renovate both concepts of structuring and analytical approaches that will productively address recent music. This renovation of the analytical project is premised on the idea that

4 Introduction analytical investigation produces knowledge about musical experiences. The renovation does not propose a system of music structural concepts or define a method. Rather, I propose working procedures that include critical, productive, and speculative stages,5 that engage the multiple perspectives of creators, performers, and listeners, and that generate interpretive modellings unique to specific works. The second part of Reconceiving Structure comprises four analyses that exemplify these renovations. My overarching goal for Reconceiving Structure is to encourage and shape a broader context in which to discuss, engage, and hence experience music of the present. From critique and renovation to productive analysis Reconceiving Structure proceeds from critique and renovation, and then to productive analysis. The titles of chapters are: Part I Chapter 1: “Modern” Music Analysis Chapter 2: What Is Structure Anyway? Chapter 3: Music Analysis—Producing Knowledge Chapter 4: Reconceiving Structure: Investigating, Mapping, Speculating Part II Chapter 5: Technê of Radiance: Kaija Saariaho’s Lonh (1996) Chapter 6: Difference and Identity: Sofia Gubaidulina’s Second String ­Quartet (1987) Chapter 7: Incessance of Memory: Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet no. 2, Demons and Angels (2004–05) Chapter 8: Spiral Morphing: Emergence, Saturation, and Uncoiling in Anna Clyne’s Choke (2004) The following précis of chapters gives readers an overview of my project and a sense of the two large parts of critique and renovation and of productive analysis. Part I The first part of Reconceiving Structure proceeds from critique to renovation. The first chapter focuses on the concepts and practices of music analysis that emerged in the mid-twentieth century, historicizing them as fulfilling specific aesthetic and educational purposes of the time. The second chapter addresses the particular concepts of structure that arose with modern analysis. These two chapters together argue that existing concepts and practices of analysis are not fully productive for recent music and set the stage for a renovation of analysis. The third chapter develops the idea that analysis produces

Introduction  5 knowledge about music as a form of sonic thinking, and the fourth chapter lays out working procedures for analytical processes that incorporate the multiple perspectives of creators, performers, listeners, and analysts—­ procedures that can address recent music as a structuring of musical time.

Chapter 1: “Modern” Music Analysis In the years immediately following World War II, a number of dynamic composers burst onto the musical stage actively promoting a “new” music that would embody an aesthetic based in notions of rationality specific to the middle years of the twentieth century. In their efforts to create a “new music” in accord with the authority of science in post–World War II culture, many composers in Europe and North America linked the creative process of composition to analysis and theory.6 The structure of music—especially one that adhered to scientistic notions of rationality—became a prime conceptual focus of this aesthetic, and an obligatory part of this compositional aesthetic was the development of new theoretical models for musical design and the demonstration of musical structures through music analysis. Music analysis in particular was promoted both as an activity central to the training of composers and as a self-standing mode of musical inquiry. Analysis not only allowed insight into the creative process but also revealed the constructive basis of music through a concept of structure that met the goals of the pervading scientism.7 For postwar composers, “music” becomes synonymous with “structure” that needed to be explained through the development of theoretical concepts and revealed through analysis. For postwar composers a culturally valid compositional technique and aesthetic were linked to analysis and theory. It was not enough to create— the composer had to explain music in ways that met the test of a rigorous scientific attitude through both analytical study and the development of theoretical concepts. The concept of musical structure and the methods of revealing it through analysis and theory took on new and significant roles in musical creation and research. From this mix of aesthetic and research concerns, a newly defined practice of analysis and theory emerged that was colored by the modern aesthetic of post–World War II composers and the broader philosophical concerns it entailed. The resulting “modern” practice of analysis and theory was and has been premised on a concept of structure linked to compositional techniques promoted by high modern composers in the sway of cultural and intellectual scientism in the postwar years.8 The practice of analysis and theory that emerged during its years of growth, roughly 1950–1985, bears the traces on one hand of the cultural authority of science in its methods and concepts, and on the other hand of the bond between analytic practice and the aesthetic goals of high modernist composition. At the same time, this link between a certain brand of intellectual rigor and the creative process proved an essential foundation for establishing graduate degree programs in composition and theory at such institutions 

6 Introduction as Princeton and Yale Universities in the United States. Through these educational institutions, music analysis grew and over the ensuing years has become a staple of music education generally. This chapter traces the emergence and development of music analysis in tandem with its twin, music theory, in order to demonstrate how current notions of analysis and theory are defined by modern, or specifically high modern, intellectual norms and social structures and how analytical practice conflates technical issues of composition with abstract speculation into a single and limiting notion of musical structure.9 My critique of the high modern attributes of analytical practice sets up later stages of the argument in two ways: 1) it grounds the observation that the modern conception of music as “structure” that is revealed through music analysis does little to explain or contextualize in meaningful terms recently created music and 2) it  de-universalizes analysis and suggests that other forms of knowledgebuilding generate more fruitful ways of analyzing recently created music.

Chapter 2: What Is Structure Anyway? In the years after World War II, concepts of structure took on increasingly important roles for composers and scholars of music.10 Thinking about musical structure is of course nothing new and is deeply inscribed in the long history of music theory, from the writings in Greek philosophy to current thought in musical cognition. But the interest in musical structure intensified in the middle years of the twentieth century because of complementary developments in anthropology, philosophy, and architecture in particular. A quick review of how the term structure has been used in analytical and theoretical writings since 1950 reveals that the term has a broad range of meanings, uses, and functions—so broad that we might well wonder what it could possibly mean to say that music “has” structure. The breadth of meanings it assumes and the ubiquity of its use indicate that the concept of structure is a mostly unexamined assumption. This chapter initiates a critique of the concept of structure in the postwar years in order 1) to highlight its complicity in the broader intellectual context and 2) to historicize its meanings in current analytical and theoretical contexts. The chapter has three sections. Section I samples how a concept of structure has been used in writings about music across a range of scholarly perspectives: encyclopedia articles, music theory, music history, and ethnomusicology. Restricted to writings since World War II, this sampling demonstrates that the term structure refers to a wide array of musical phenomena and serves more as what the sociologist William Sewell describes as an “epistemic metaphor” that “empowers what it designates” (Sewell 1992). This is not an exhaustive historical account of structure as a musical concept but rather a sampling of the range of functions and meanings the term assumes in writings about music.

Introduction  7 Section II considers the concept of structure as it was framed in the Structuralist debates of the 1960s. My claim here is that the ideas of Structuralism played an influential role in the development of post–World War II music analysis and theory and that the debates within Structuralism itself provide some useful tools for considering the concept of structure in music studies. In Section III I use the observations arising from the Structuralist debates to accomplish three things: to historicize the concept of structure as it has been used in music studies since the mid-twentieth century, to initiate a critique of those concepts of musical structure, revisiting the music quotes of Section I, and to suggest ways of reconceiving structure as an emergent, phenomenal, and malleable feature of musical sound—to reconceive it as “structuring.”

Chapter 3: Music Analysis—Producing Knowledge The critiques of Chapters 1 and 2 suggest that analysis and its corresponding concept of structure as articulated in music scholarship since the midtwentieth century have been shaped by historical and cultural exigencies of the time and in particular by a high modern aesthetic and its orienting philosophical context. These critiques establish the circumstances that motivate a renovation of analytical inquiry. Chapter 3 begins the process of renovation by demonstrating that the close-reading activities of musical analysis are viable and necessary knowledge-producing activities and that a renovation of analysis is crucial to the project of generating a vital discourse about recent music.11 It lays out the philosophical background against which a productive analytical inquiry is conceived, addressing both epistemological and methodological issues. The chapter is organized around four topic areas: 1 2 3 4

Musical works and listening Sound-thinking: musical things and the structuring of musical time The analyst: investigating and speculating Producing knowledge—affecting new musical behaviors

Discussion of these topics does not define particular musical concepts of structuring nor define a methodology. Rather it sets out the fundamental positions about music, musical experience, and music analysis that provide a basis for developing a productive analytical inquiry appropriate for the twenty-first century and its music. These fundamental positions are motivated by five aspirational goals for productive music analysis: 1) it focuses on particular musical works, interrogates them as sound, and takes account of the various ways they make musical sense; 2) it generates new forms of musical behavior—be it listening, performing or creating; 3) it queries the conceptual, cultural, and historical factors that shape our engagements with musical works; 4) it explores

8 Introduction the reflexivity between sensation and concept; and 5) it affects the nature of our experiential engagements with musical works and with music generally. Analytical inquiry as I define it here entails wholistic investigation of a musical work (or possibly works) from these multiple perspectives with the goal of producing knowledge—knowledge about musical works and the nature of musical experience.

Chapter 4: Reconceiving Structure: Investigating, Mapping, Speculating This chapter lays out the working procedures for reconceiving structure incorporating the multiple perspectives of creators, performers, listeners, and analysts. The procedures delineate three stages of investigating, mapping, and speculating, which together have the goal of producing knowledge about musical works. The procedures focus on music as a structuring of musical time; and they entail the activities on one hand, of doing analysis by investigating and mapping a work and on the other, of conceptualizing a musical work’s structuring of musical time with speculative accounts. A critical component is woven explicitly into the investigating stage during which the analyst addresses the cultural, social, and historical features that may shape the activities of creators, performers, listeners, and analysts. My approach to musical structuring and to the stages of investigating, mapping, and speculating is indebted to a broad array of thinkers and fields of inquiry. Most significantly, these include various strands of “postphilosophies” and recent thought in cartography—contributing strands that may be traced in the working procedures. Three roughly chronological stages of analytical activities delineate the working procedures: investigating, mapping, and speculating. The first investigative stage of these working procedures is motivated by post-phenomenological philosophy and includes investigation of the musical work as sounding from sensory-hermeneutical perspectives. The second mapping stage is informed by cartography and has the goal of articulating the work as a multidimensional musical thinking. The third speculating stage builds upon the prior two and constructs a speculative account of the work as a historically, socially, and culturally embedded structuring of musical time, a sound-thinking of the world in the Deleuzian sense. This third stage does not end the process of productive analysis but rather is an interpretive formulation that hopefully generates further investigating, mapping, and speculating. In the investigating stage, the analyst focuses first on a work’s sounding events from the sensory perspective of what Don Ihde has termed “microperceptions” and then considers the hermeneutical context—or “macroperceptions.” But as Ihde points out, these two perspectives are inextricably linked and must be considered together (Ihde 1990). The investigations of macroperceptual experience builds upon Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge: investigations of macroperceptions focus specifically on the

Introduction  9 situated roles of creators, performers, and analyst; the cultural, social, and historical situation of the work; and the situation of the work’s reception. Both the micro- and macroperceptual investigations are open and exploratory and engage the analyst in critical reflection on musical sounding as historically, socially, and culturally contingent. Mapping is an active engagement with musical works that results in the making of maps, a process of making that generates knowledge about a work. Mappings of the musical soundings of a work may take any number of forms, from three-dimensional models to graphic depictions, or to verbal descriptions of the work’s structuring of musical time. Mappings do not reproduce a work’s sounding but rather, following Denis Wood, link listeners—including performers, creators, analysts—to musical structurings they might encounter in musical experience (Wood 1992, 4–5). Mappings embody the analyst’s encounters with the sounding of a musical work and are an ongoing part of the analytical process. The goal of the third stage of the analytical working procedures is to produce an analysis that speculates on the work’s structuring of musical time. Such an interpretive account originates from the activities of investigating and mapping, the results of which may or may not play an explicit role in the interpretation. The analyst speculates on the musical things of a work and their relations not as fixed structures but rather as a network of sounding possibilities, and the analysis itself presents a speculation on how the work’s structuring of musical time emerges from the flow of its sounding events, how the work accomplishes what I call its sound-thinking. Such speculating is an open-ended process and each analytical account a contribution to the ongoing process of producing knowledge. Part II Analyses of four works exemplify productive analysis. I chose these works for several reasons. First, each has an appealing musical presence that engages our situation as humans in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; second, the four works challenge existing linguistic/conceptual paradigms of music analysis in diverse ways; and third, the musical structurings of each work invite new forms of experiential understanding. The four analyses are my interpretive “performances” of the working procedures described in Chapter 4, and in this sense they present my interpretive engagements with these four works. Each analysis frames the music in terms of issues specific to the contemporary world: evocations of a premodern world through new sound technologies, difference and identity, the senses of cultural and narrative place evoked by musical memories, and becoming through temporal recurrence. Each demonstrates how these contemporary issues inhere in the musical structurings of timbre, texture, articulations, pitch, duration, dynamics, and affect, and each employs

10 Introduction mappings of various sorts that link readers to music they might encounter. My goals in presenting these analyses are to demonstrate how the structurings of these particular works “think the world” in Deleuze’s sense, to open up a discourse about recent music in the Western classical tradition, and to generate new forms of experiential understanding.

Chapter 5: Technê of Radiance: Kaija Saariaho’s Lonh (1996) Saariaho’s Lonh sets poetry of the twelfth century troubadour Jaufré Rudel for soprano and electronics. In the language of Occitan (Old Provençal), the poetry recounts the troubadour’s longing for an idealized and unobtainable love. Saariaho’s music romanticizes this premodern world of uncomplicated longing and desire with the sounds and sonorities of radiance. The analysis delineates and traces the variety of sounds and sonorities that create the sense of shimmering radiance over the course of Lonh, attending when appropriate to the electronic procedures that are used to enhance the quality of sound. Not concerned simply with the technological projection of radiance as a particular quality of sound, the analysis demonstrates how radiance serves as the motif by which the premodern world of the troubadour’s longing is refracted through the lens of postmodern culture. Saariaho’s subtle maskings of the high degree of technological manipulation and of the gender inversion of the singing voice give the sheer beauty of Lonh a critical edge.

Chapter 6: Difference and Identity: Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet (1987) Sofia Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet musically thinks difference and identity. My analysis of the Second String Quartet argues that its music makes audible the forces of difference through repetition. The quartet has three parts, the first fully focused on the processes of musical differing. The second and third parts of the piece dramatize this process of sonic differing of the first part—drawing out difference in yet more novel ways. I link the quartet’s thinking of difference and identity first to the historical emergence of concepts of difference and identity in philosophy during the middle years of the twentieth century, and second to Gubaidulina’s situation as a female in a male-dominated profession and as person who remarks on her multiethnic identity. My claim is not that the Quartet’s music represents Gubaidulina’s difference as a composer who is female, or as a composer of the avant-garde, or as a unique compositional voice. Rather, I argue that the Quartet musically thinks difference, in Gubaidulina’s terms, through “transformations” of sonic “elements” that create a “vital and essential transition from one state to another.” (Gubaidulina 2014) Repetition is crucial to enacting this sense of transitioning since its proliferation effectively dissolves the identity of repeating musical events and allows difference to become sonically present.

Introduction  11

Chapter 7: Incessance of Memory: Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet no. 2, Demons and Angels (2005) As its subtitle suggests, this string quartet musically explores the volatile and manic character of the mental states of a man who in Garrop’s terms “has lost his mind” (Garrop 2009). Of the four movements, the first and third address the demonic states and the second and fourth address the angelic My analysis focuses on the third movement, “Inner Demons,” which “depicts the man as he loses his mind” (Garrop 2005). In particular, the analysis shows how the music thinks obsessively through cultural memory relevant to our time. The movement presents two dancelike melodic figures—one a tarantella and the other a waltz—and it quotes the folk tune “I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” Together these dance allusions and the quotation invoke various music-cultural memories. Eventually through their interactions, fragmentations, and transformations, these allusions and quotations lose their memorial resonance and enact processes of obsessive thinking and remembering.

Chapter 8: Spiral Morphing: Emergence, Saturation, and Uncoiling in Anna Clyne’s Choke (2004) Clyne’s Choke for baritone saxophone and tape has a colorful palette of musical sounds, created by the live saxophonist and occurring in the tape part, which consists mostly of transformed samples of the baritone saxophone. The musical structuring of Choke engages processes of Spiral Morphing, or in other words, a morphing process involving a transformed recurrence of events such that later events emerge from earlier ones. The expressive character and force of Choke is generated in part by the processes of Spiral Morphing characterized by the emergence of new sound things, the saturation of those processes, and the uncoiling of those processes at the end of the piece.

Notes 1. The doomsayers of classical music often point to the labor disputes in orchestras, the debts of major performing institutions, the falling revenues for classical recordings, or the decrease in ticket sales at orchestral and chamber music events. While such things are factual, their occurrence does not necessarily prophesy the end of a long-standing musical tradition. Like other kinds of cultural activities, classical music practices have changed and will continue to change. The lament for the so-called demise of classical music has sources other than what is on the surface of such statements, as I will argue in this context. 2. Any number of authors have promoted a one-cause explanation for the so-called “death” of classical music, including Lebrecht (1997) who blames marketing practices, Abbate (2004) who blames formalist and hermeneutic scholarship, or,

12 Introduction taking a somewhat different tack, Kramer (2007) who argues that the relevance of classical music may be found in its values, which have gone unremarked. 3. In its focus on linguistic, conceptual, and graphic approaches to musical understanding, my project bears some similarities to Abbate’s critique of formalist or hermeneutic scholarship in her “Music—Drastic/Gnostic?” (Abbate 2004). She criticizes such music scholarship for its tendency to deal “in abstractions and constructs under the aspect of eternity … [that] have little to do with real [i.e., performed] music …” (512) My concern in Reconceiving Structure is not with “abstraction” but rather with structural concepts that tend to account for recent music only in negative terms. 4. As I will argue later, the fringing of contemporary music is a legacy of earlier scholarly and critical practice that positioned the then “new” music as complex and hence difficult but even further as comprehensible only through an understanding of the technical details of its creation. 5. Later I will refer to these stages as: investigating, mapping, and speculating. 6. I limit my focus to North America and Europe here for pragmatic reasons and the limit does not imply that practices in South America, Asia, Oceania, or Africa were different or the same. 7. As will become clear in later discussion, my focus in the book is on music analytical not theoretical practice, and giving priority to analysis is part of the larger argument of the book. While it is not entirely possible to disentangle analysis from theory, I will argue here that a focus on analysis as a primary means of musical engagement is possible and preferable. 8. As I use it here, the term “high modernism” refers to a type of modernism that emerged after World War II and is associated with scientism. 9. My focus on and critique of how professional scholarship has conceptually framed music follows in the tradition of other such critiques, starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Kerman (1980), Solie (1980–1), and Treitler (1982) and continuing through the 90s with McClary (1991), Tomlinson (1993), and L. Kramer (1992 and 1993), to name just a few. Of these, McClary (1991) is the only one who devotes considerable time to recently created music of any sort. 10. Concepts of structure took on an increasingly important function for performers and listeners as well, but this was a function that was driven by the concerns of composers and then scholars. 11. Such renovated analytical practice could apply equally well to music of past eras, but my focus here is on recently created music.

Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. 2004. “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30/3: 505–536. Burkholder, J. Peter. 1983. “Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream of Music of the Last Hundred Years.” Journal of Musicology 2/2: 115–134. Garrop, Stacy. 2009. String Quartet no. 2, “Demons and Angels.” King of Prussia, PA: Theodore Presser. Gubaidulina, Sofia. 2014. “Composer Note.” Schirmer Music Sales Classical. Accessed November 15, 2014. http://www.schirmer.com/default.aspx?TabId=24 20&State_2874=2&workId_2874=24110.

Introduction  13 Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. “Sunday Dialogue—Is Classical Music Dying?” 2012. New York Times, November 25. Accessed November 15, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/opinion/ sunday/sunday-dialogue-is-classical-music-dying.html?pagewanted=all. Kerman, Joseph. 1980. “How We Got into Analysis and How to Get Out.” Critical Inquiry 7: 311–331. Kramer, Lawrence. 1992. “The Musicology of the Future.” Repercussions 1/1: 5–18. ———. 1993. “Music Criticism and the Postmodernist Turn: In Contrary Motion with Gary Tomlinson.” Current Musicology 53: 25–35. ———. 2007. Why Classical Music Still Matters. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lebrecht, Norman. 1997. Who Killed Classical Music? Maestros, Managers, and Corporate Politics. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sewell, William H., Jr. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1–29. Solie, Ruth. 1980–1. “The Living Work: Organicism and Musical Analysis.” Nineteenth Century Music 4: 147–56. Tomlinson, Gary. 1993. “Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer.” And “Tomlinson Responds.” Current Musicology 53: 18–24 and 36–35. Tommasini, Anthony. 2013. “The 12-Tone of a Prisoner’s One Chance.” New York Times, 7 June. Accessed November 15, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2013/06/08/arts/music/philharmonic-and-gerald-finley-in-il prigioniero.html?_ r=0&adxnnl=1&ref=anthonytommasini&adxnnlx=1370795792-FjmD2m Tm08k5XyuTidw6Xw. Treitler, Leo. 1982. “‘To Worship That Celestial Sound’: Motives for Analysis.” The Journal of Musicology 1: 153–70. Vanhoenacker, Mark. 2014. “Requiem: Classical Music in America is Dead.” Slate, 21 January. Accessed November 15, 2014. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/ culturebox/2014/01/classical_music_sales_decline_is_classical_on_death_s_door. html. Wood, Denis. 1992. The Power of Maps, with John Fels. New York: Guilford Press.

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Part I

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1 “Modern” Music Analysis

The practice of music analysis within professional music studies in North America and Western Europe has become more defined and prominent over the last 60 years, and as a consequence of this changing status, its purposes and goals have been the subject of debate from a variety of perspectives. The expansion of music analysis after 1950 was directly correlated with the move to define it as a self-standing mode of musical inquiry, but all along it proved difficult to separate analysis from considerations of history, epistemology, aesthetics, ideology, and most significantly, its doppelgänger music theory. Typically, analysis is understood as the “empirical” engagement with musical works and theory the underlying conceptual framework for analysis. Their relation is as “chicken-to-egg”: dependent on musical concepts, analysis builds upon theory, but in order to develop concepts, theory needs some sort of empirical engagement with music. And woven into these entanglements of circular causality are issues of historical change, epistemic foundations, aesthetic goals, and ideological alignments that inhabit both music analytical and theoretical endeavors. Precisely because of these richly textured entanglements, analysis emerged as a self-standing mode of inquiry in Western Europe and North America in the years following the conclusion of World War II. Its definition as selfstanding was enacted by a wide variety of interested people—composers, musicologists, performers—and through the publication of several books demarcating its goals, practices, and history, the addition of self-standing analysis classes as part of college curricula, and eventually the founding of a journal and society.1 And like any maturing practice, analysis had its proponents and its detractors who have often engaged in spirited scholarly debate.2 This chapter focuses on how and why analysis emerged as a self-standing practice in the years following the end of World War II until approximately 1970. Within Western Europe and North America, this time period was witness to an intense outpouring of “new” music and writings about it. My primary task here is to demonstrate not only the historical, epistemological, aesthetic, and ideological entanglements that underlay the move toward establishing analysis as an independent mode of musical inquiry but further how these entanglements are woven into the methods and concepts that

18  Part I have been defined as prototypical for such analytical inquiry. This demonstration provides the basis for my larger claim: born of high modernist aesthetic and intellectual norms of mid-twentieth century Europe and North America, music analysis has itself been a “modernist” practice—its intellectual and aesthetics orientations largely unmarked in disciplinary terms. My goal in this chapter is to de-universalize analytical concepts and methods and to demonstrate their implication in an aesthetic project of the past. My discussion traces a history of writings about analysis, especially in relation to music theory and compositional technique, that helps to establish it as a self-standing practice. In the initial stages of this history, the writings were mostly authored by composers who defined the primary goal of analysis as the elucidation of musical structure. This history demonstrates that the notion of musical structure in these writings carries the marks of on one hand the technical interests of composers and on the other hand the epistemic authority of science.3 In other words, operative notions of musical structure that came to define analytical practice conflate the practical concerns of creation with the speculative concerns of a science-defined notion of theory. New Music and the Analytical-Theoretical Imperative In the aftermath of World War II, a new generation of composers emerged with the goals of creating a “new” music that would extend the general musical trajectories established by composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, Edgard Varèse, and members of the Second Viennese School.4 This generation of post–World War II composers—such as Boulez and Stockhausen in Europe and Babbitt in the United States—was interested in creating a new sound world that transcended the last vestiges of late-nineteenth century Romanticism by conceiving compositional method as a wholly rational and systematic process.5 So, not only did Boulez nail Schoenberg’s coffin shut with a critique of his phrase and formal designs but also Ernst Krenek, distrustful of compositional intuition, observes that composers have preferred “to set up an impersonal mechanism” in order to transcend the ghosts of inspiration (Krenek 1962, 90). And while the impetus toward a new and rational approach to music was primarily compositional, it had ramifications for music analysis and its twin, music theory. In Western Europe and the United States, two similar and simultaneous developments helped to propel an interest in and need for music analysis within the new paradigm for musical composition. The “Darmstadt Summer Courses”—the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik—were started in 1946 by Wolfgang Steinecke following the conclusion of World War II. Part of the effort to rebuild German culture, the Darmstadt courses brought together composers, performers, and

“Modern” Music Analysis  19 musicologists as both teachers and students.6 The courses paired concerts and seminars, the latter including lectures ranging from more general aesthetic discussions to detailed analyses of particular works that focused on compositional craft or more general music theoretical formulations. Significantly, Theodor Adorno, a strong advocate of the value of music analysis, participated as a critic and composer.7 Several established and emerging composers delivered lectures analyzing particular works or on music theory generally.8 Several of these lectures became legendary for their analytical prowess, theoretical formulations, and aesthetic pronouncements, including those by Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, and Nono. These analyses not only set standards for a particular type of analytic content and presentation but further sent a strong message that avantgarde composers needed the conceptual and methodological skills both to develop logical systems of structure for their own use and to explain those structuring systems manifest in the music of other composers. The analyses set up a strong correlation between analytic skill and compositional acumen, a correlation Boulez confirms in the conclusion of one of his published Darmstadt lectures on musical technique. Therefore, let us not underestimate the implications of the studies [of contemporary techniques] we have undertaken; these should not be regarded as a set of recipes, a basis for “manufacture”. I proceeded from the elementary to the most general level in order to stress that this was not a catalogue of more or less useful procedures, but an attempt to construct a coherent system by means of a methodical investigation of the musical world, deducing multiple consequences from a certain number of rational points of departure. I consider that methodical investigation and the search for a coherent system are an indispensable basis for all creation, more so than the actual attainments which are the source or the consequence of this investigation. (Boulez 1971,142–3; my emphasis) For Boulez, compositional inspiration must properly spring from both rational study of the “musical world” and the construction of a “coherent system” for structuring that world. In other words, the research paradigm of science serves as the foundation of compositional craft. While some of the analytical essays delivered at Darmstadt were printed elsewhere, many appeared in Die Reihe, a serial that was published in Germany between 1955 and 1962 and edited by the composers Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen (Eimert and Stockhausen 1955–62).9 With the eventual publication of eight volumes, the journal extended the reach of the Darmstadt Courses, serving as a loudspeaker for the articulation of a new aesthetic. Its articles both addressed broad philosophical issues about the definition and role of music in contemporary society and presented specific analytical and theoretical accounts of work composed

20  Part I yesterday or from the recent past. The list below shows the English subtitles of the volumes and indicates the range of topics addressed: from the music of Anton Webern, to the new compositional medium of electronic music, to issues of compositional craft, and to analyses.10 The articles of Die Reihe were authored mainly by European composers and critics but a few were by Americans.11 Die Reihe: Subtitles (in English) of the eight volumes published between 1955–62 Vol. 1 Electronic Music Vol. 2 Anton Webern Vol. 3 Musical Craftsmanship Vol. 4 Young Composers Vol. 5 Reports—Analyses Vol. 6 Speech and Music Vol. 7 Form—Space Vol. 8 Retrospective Some of the more well-known essays published in Die Reihe include György Ligeti’s analysis of Pierre Boulez’s Structures 1a in Volume 4 and his “Metamorphoses of Musical Form” in Volume 7; and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s analytical and theoretical discussion of temporal organization in “… how time passes. …” in Volume 3 and his “Music in Space” in Volume 5. And while such analytical studies implied that speculation about the structuring of composed works would positively influence creation of new works in the future, the causal arrow was sometimes reversed. For instance, at the end of his analysis of Debussy’s Jeux, Herbert Eimert writes: “to appreciate Jeux one must be familiar with the resources of present-day compositions” (Eimert 1961, 20). In other words, not only is Debussy’s compositional legacy played out in music of mid-century but further it is the compositional speculations of contemporary composers that allow comprehension of Debussy’s later music. In the United States the rise of analytic practice had a similar impetus in compositional concerns but the specific political and cultural context in North America effected a somewhat different trajectory for that practice. Two factors are significant to this trajectory. First, because of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (commonly known as the G.I. Bill), which funded college education for returning war veterans, higher education expanded significantly, including the increasing growth and often adoption of musical education in colleges and universities. Second, musicians fleeing the Nazis brought along a whole host of musical traditions and included those who promoted the theories and analytical methods of Heinrich Schenker. While the trajectory unfolded at various places in the United States, events

“Modern” Music Analysis  21 during and immediately after World War II at Princeton University provide a clear and succinct demonstration of the intertwining of analytical and compositional practices.12 The composer Roger Sessions started teaching at Princeton University in 1936 before a music department had been formed.13 Sessions was a noted composition teacher whose pedagogical method included close study of music by important historical and contemporary composers. Over nearly five decades he published numerous articles and four books. Sessions encouraged composers to analyze past and present music because it allowed them “to observe how music is put together by a master craftsman …” (Sessions 1979c, 220). In a 1949 article on the issue of whether composition should be taught at the university, Sessions writes: On a more specifically scholarly level, also, I believe the composer has [a] contribution to make. For musical theory is, I believe, in a transitional stage: that of catching up with developments in music which in their origins date back for more than a century … and of systematizing the musical syntax, or musical syntaxes, of the present day. The composer, if he is mature and articulate, can make valuable and even decisive contributions in this respect, by his first-hand experience—by the type of understanding that can come only from first-hand experience—of creative musical thought. He knows from constant practice what the experience of composing is like; he knows as well as can be known what processes go into that experience, and in fortunate cases, on the basis of that knowledge is in a position to make illuminating contributions to musical theory and even in some cases to music history. I believe, therefore, that the teaching of composition on the most serious level is one of the vital functions of the university music department. (“The Composer in the University,” Sessions 1979b, 198, my emphasis) Three of Sessions’s points are central to my argument. First, the “mature and articulate” composer does not simply use a compositional technique but further should be able to systematize musical syntax. Second, the composer’s practical creative knowledge provides invaluable insight into the structuring of musical time. And third, the potential contributions of composers to music theoretical understanding justified compositional instruction at the university. At Princeton, Sessions played an influential role for two students who in 1942 were among the first to receive the M.F.A. degrees in music at Princeton: Milton Babbitt and Edward T. Cone. The Department of Music was formally established in 1946 and soon thereafter both Milton Babbitt (1948) and Edward Cone (1947) joined its faculty. Following Sessions, both Babbitt and Cone embroidered the idea of the composer-theorist.14 Cone, a composer and pianist, became known primarily for his published analyses

22  Part I of selected music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a general discussion of the relation of musical structure to performance, and commentary on the nature of music analysis at mid-century. Known equally as a composer and theorist, Babbitt published theoretical articles that formalized and developed twelve-tone technique with mathematical terminology and concepts that extended series-based structure into other non-pitch domains; further, he published notable analytical articles on Stravinsky and Schoenberg and promoted Schenkerian approaches to tonal music. Like Sessions, Cone and Babbitt were centrally involved in shaping a program of study for creative musicians in a university setting and in justifying the inclusion of such study to university administrators and the academic community.15 Writing in a 1948 article titled “The Creative Artist in the University,” Cone argues that artists should work within a university environment for two primary reasons. First, he claims that creative work in the arts is a “unique channel of knowledge, and as such is in the proper sphere of the university” (Cone 1948, 178). In other words, well-educated students should have access to this mode of knowledge. Second, the creative artist should be responsible for training not only a new generation of artists but further for training new audiences of “men and women who, made receptive by education at its best, are given an opportunity to find out at first hand what the creative artists of their own day and in their own country are doing” (Cone 1948, 180). The creative artist with the requisite verbal skills and with “broad tastes and wide intellectual interests, with the ability and a desire to teach” will find a home in the university (Cone 1948, 181). Babbitt’s by-now-infamous article of 1958, “The Composer as Specialist” (AKA “Who Cares if You Listen”) must be read as an exercise in validation within this context (Babbitt 2003a).16 By establishing a parallel research role for composer and physicist, Babbitt could claim a place for professional music training in the postwar U.S. research university. For Babbitt, an “integral component” of the music of the “research” composer is the “development of analytical theory, concerned with the systematic formulation of such principles to the end of greater efficiency, economy, and understanding. Compositions so rooted necessarily ask comparable knowledge and experience from the listener” (Babbitt 2003a, 50). In other words, the new music demands systematic analytical understanding—such understanding communicated to potential listeners by composers. For Sessions, Cone, and Babbitt, the composer should be integrated into the university not simply because creative thinking constitutes a viable form of knowledge about the world but further because analytical/theoretical insight into musical structure from the perspective of the composer grounds a proper understanding of music generally. The Princeton Seminars in Advanced Musical Studies, apparently inspired by the Darmstadt Summer Courses, ran in 1959 and 1960, under the auspices of Paul Fromm and the Fromm Music Foundation. In 1962, a collection of essays was published from these seminars as Problems of

“Modern” Music Analysis  23 Modern Music, edited by Paul Henry Lang. The authors included: Fromm, Sessions, Babbitt, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Allen Forte, Elliott Carter, and notably Edward Cone with an essay titled “Analysis Today” (Lang 1962). On the heels of this collection, a new journal, Perspectives of New Music, was launched in 1962 as a means of providing access to issues of contemporary music and as a response to Die Reihe. Its first editors were Arthur Berger, then on the composition faculty of Brandeis University, and Benjamin Boretz, then a graduate student at Princeton. The Fromm Music Foundation also provided backing for the journal and Fromm himself articulated its goals in the inaugural volume: “Perspectives of New Music attempts to meet the widely recognized need for an American journal devoted to the serious consideration of contemporary music” and to provide an opportunity for composers “to discuss issues vital to them” (Fromm 1962, 1–2). And in their inaugural editorial, quoted partially below, Berger and Boretz lay out their goals for the new journal: Perspectives of New Music has been established to provide a medium for articles that seriously explore those aspects of contemporary music with which composers find themselves most deeply involved. We hope to make professional writings available to composers, and also to help other members of the musical community become aware of the development of ideas that determine the nature of musical phenomena today as well as their future course. … Our principal aim is to probe as deeply as possible into fundamental issues that by their nature must be treated concretely and analytically with sophisticated methods, and that require investigation from many different sides. … We thus regard it as our responsibility to offer, in the pages of Perspectives of New Music, articles and reviews that dwell seriously, rather than touch lightly, upon the subjects treated. (Berger and Boretz 1962, 4–5, my emphasis) The apparent assumption motivating a discourse on contemporary music is that “professional writing” that “probes deeply” into “fundamental issues” provides the information on compositional design and intention that will on one hand, allow composers to read serious writing about recent compositional practices, and on the other hand, provide information about those practices for those on the non-composer side of the communication line to assure understanding and hence acceptance of the music.17 It was mostly composers, writing as theorists and analysts, who provided the articles about contemporary music practices, and analysis was one of the tools utilized to “dwell seriously, rather than touch lightly, upon” contemporary practices. The list below shows the authors of the first volume, a veritable “who’s who” of prominent and upcoming composers and performers in the United States.

24  Part I Perspectives of New Music Volume 1, Number 1 (Fall 1962) Table of Contents Paul Fromm, “Young Composers: Perspective and Prospect” Arthur Berger and Benjamin Boretz, “Editorial Note” In Memoriam: Irving Fine (1914–1962) Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, “A Quintet of Dialogues” Edward T. Cone, “Stravinsky: The Progress of a Method” Ernst Krenek, “Tradition in Perspective” Karlheinz Stockhausen, “The Concept of Unity in Electronic Music,” trans. Elaine Barkin Milton Babbitt, “Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium” Charles Rosen, “The Proper Study of Music” David Lewin, “A Theory of Segmental Association in Twelve-Tone Music” Andrew Imbrie, “Roger Sessions: In Honor of His Sixty-fifth Birthday” Colloquy and Review Elliott Carter, “The Milieu of the American Composer” Seymour Shifrin, “A Note from the Underground” Michael Steinberg, “Tradition and Responsibility” John Backus, “Die Reihe: A Scientific Evaluation” Eric Salzman; Paul Des Marais, “Aaron Copland’s Nonet: Two Views” Peter Westergaard, “Some Problems in Rhythmic Theory and Analysis” Henry Weinberg, “Letter from Italy” Most of the authors were composers writing about contemporary music practices from a variety of perspectives. Some essays are primarily theoretical, such as Babbitt’s “Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium,” some include theory and analysis, such as Lewin’s “A Theory of Segmental Association in Twelve-Tone Music,” some make historical arguments through analysis, such as Cone’s “Stravinsky: The Progress of a Method,” and others reflect on aesthetic issues, such as Krenek’s “Tradition in Perspective.” The “Colloquy and Review” section notably includes two analyses of Copland’s serial structuring of his “Nonet,” one by Eric Salzman and the other by Paul DesMarais. Charles Rosen, writing as a pianist, makes clear the ­“composition-centric” goal of all music education in his article “The Proper Study of Music”: “Nevertheless if music is to be taught at all outside of the professional instruction of composers to compose and performers to ­perform. … then it has become clear that the only form of teaching that will have any significance and continuous relevance is that which considers and discusses those elements of music, past or present, which have at least a potential interest for the contemporary composer” (Rosen 1962, 81; Rosen’s emphasis). Still published today, Perspectives of New Music in its initial years provided opportunity for composers writing as theorists and analysts to articulate ideas about musical design and aesthetics and to demonstrate their

“Modern” Music Analysis  25 intellectual prowess within the structure of a peer-reviewed journal housed in an academic institution.18 Composers not only developed theories for their own creative purposes but further worked to establish more comprehensive and formal analytical and theoretical understandings of what makes existing music not simply “work” but “work well.”19 In the United States, analytical expertise extended not only to recent music but also to music of the past, since as Sessions maintained, composers should study “how music is put together by a master craftsman”20 (Sessions 1979c, 220). Since agreement on who constitutes a “master” of contemporary music is elusive, the locus of undisputed craft was sought in the music of composers sanctioned by the canonic processes of teleological history. The turn toward music of past “masters” had an additional impetus in the import of Schenkerian analytical theory by several European exiles. While the composers of Europe took little interest in the work of Schenker, many in the United States championed his theories. Schenker’s ideas took root in the United States in part because of the advocacy of his followers and because this particular brand of theory conformed to the larger analytical and intellectual concerns of the compositional community in a university environment.21 Already in 1935, Roger Sessions took note of the systematic aspects of Schenker’s analytical theory. ­Writing on the occasion of Schenker’s death and notably in Modern Music, a ­quarterly j­ournal devoted to promoting developments in contemporary music, S­ essions offered mostly praise: What Schenker has done … is to “clean up” the current conceptions of counterpoint and place them on a more intellectually and pedagogically tenable basis. Counterpoint is here conceived … as the systematic and logically developed study of the fundamental problems of voice leading. (Sessions 1979a, 234, my emphasis) Sessions focuses the value of Schenker’s analytical theory onto current compositional practice while deflecting the “dogmatism” of the later writings. In his closing comments, Sessions writes: [Composers today] will derive much profit and help from the clear and profound conceptions in Schenker’s earlier works, just as they will turn away from the Talmudic subtleties and the febrile dogmatism of his later ones. (Sessions 1979a, 240; my emphasis)22 Milton Babbitt, writing in a 1952 review of Felix Salzer’s Structural Hearing, provides another perspective on the relevance of Schenkerian analysis for contemporary composers. Babbitt’s review begins with a brief introduction to Schenkerian concepts and a defense of those concepts against critics

26  Part I who would claim that the theory is non-empirical and mechanistic. Rather, Babbitt claims: … to extend the region of the empirically “knowable” is not to mechanize musical composition, but to make more easily possible an extension of the region of the musically “unknowable,” that is to say, to enable music to progress in a profound sense. (Babbitt 1952, 262; my emphasis ) For Babbitt, Schenker’s ideas provide a conceptual impetus for musical innovation and hence musical progress. In other words, new ways to study old music can serve as a prompt for the composer searching for new forms of musical communication.23 In both Western Europe and the United States, composers felt obliged not only to develop theories for their own creative purposes but further to advance a comprehensive and formal analytical and theoretical understanding of what makes existing music not simply “work” but “work well.” The impetus toward analysis and theory may be understood to respond to two different but not unrelated conditions facing composers at mid-century, one operating on both sides of the Atlantic and the second primarily in the United States. First, the impetus toward a discursive explanation of music—especially recent music—through analysis and theory served to provide insight into and advocacy for a “new” musical style that had met with resistance from some listeners, journalists, and performers. Second, since no single compositional technique was dominant, one viable way of teaching composition is to demonstrate what makes past music “work,” especially music historically canonized as masterful, and then to extrapolate from those observations about the past for the future. The general project of understanding how a piece “works”—no matter whether recent or past—requires close-study of the music and then abstraction and conceptualization. Analytical close-study then links composition and theory—links not only in the straightforward sense that theoretical speculation depends on some prior hands-on engagement with a composition but also links in the sense that underlying the valorization of theoretical abstraction is a need for an accepted technical grounding for contemporary compositional practices. In other words, the outcomes of analytical and theoretical studies bear the trace of their impetus in compositional practice even as such studies make claims to speculative explanation. Authority of Science: empiricism and speculation, analysis and theory The intertwining of the new music aesthetic with the analytical-theoretical imperative was shaped by a dominant cultural and intellectual determinant at mid-century—what has become known as the authority of science. That

“Modern” Music Analysis  27 authority is evident in the emphasis on rigorous empirical investigation of music, on the development of speculative theoretical models, and on the yoking of the creative project to such empirical-speculative work. Now writing as “composer-theorists,” composers utilized methods, conceptual models, and discursive styles from the sciences, mathematics, or analytical philosophy.24 By developing a science-like discourse about past, present, and future music, composers could claim a rational basis for music itself and for their music specifically that would be aligned with the cultural force of science within European and North American postwar culture.25 While my focus here is on the authority of science in the immediate postwar years, the growing dominance of science has a long history. Science in all its aspects has come to define the modern world and is inextricably linked to concepts of progress. During the first half of the twentieth century in particular, “science” took on an increasing authority, especially as its research led to new developments in medicine and technology that offered solutions to many of the world’s problems.26 As a sign of this growing cultural power, the discursive modes of science were adopted and adapted as a model for intellectual and creative activity of all sorts, including in the arts and humanities. The stunning scientific developments during World War II led to an intensification of the discursive power science wielded in North America and Europe in the postwar years, a power that was solidified by the vast amounts of public money devoted to scientific research, especially after the Sputnik event in 1957.27 The discourse of science became a predominant model for decision-making in government, for academic scholarship in the social sciences, humanities, and arts, and for artistic creation. Writing in 1982, the sociologists Barnes and Edge observe that “science is near to being the source of cognitive authority” (Barnes and Edge 1982, 2). And from a somewhat later perspective in 1997, the historian Ronald G. Walters observed: the “cultural authority of science … [may be observed in its] ability to define certain kinds of knowledge as legitimate, the ability to exclude others kinds of knowledge from legitimacy, and the ability to affect language, imagery, and metaphor” (Walters 1997, 7). The postwar musical culture was equally affected by the power of science to shape not only a “discourse” about music but even further music itself. And central to compositional work, analysis and theory emerged as a necessary component of a research-oriented creative project. As above, I’ll use the events at Darmstadt and Princeton in the 1950s and early 60s to demonstrate how the yoking of creation and analytical-theoretical work was under the gravitational pull of the authority of science at mid-century.28 In volume 3 of Die Reihe, “Musical Craftsmanship,” the composer Henri Pousseur establishes the necessity of the analytical-theoretical enterprise from the composer’s perspective in his article “Outline of a Method.” A composer may seek to become clear in his own mind about his way of working, or he may be showing others the way, but in either case, a

28  Part I definition—a very exact definition—of his main directions and lines of force seems indispensable. (Pousseur 1959, 44) Pousseur requires an exacting clarity about compositional craft and specifies that such clarity should arise from a theoretical investigation that is “dynamic and dialectical.” Such a music theoretical enterprise is premised on the belief that “there is no longer anything completely inexplicable, and yet nothing can be unfailingly ‘seen through.’ … It is based … upon unerring trust in the structural solidarity that exists between the world and our intellectual tools.” Pousseur identifies this theoretical enterprise as newly defined at mid-century (theory was “hardly practiced” in the first part of the century) and links it to a “new scientific state of mind” which “Gaston Bachelard [has called] super-rationalism” (Pousseur 1959, all quotes above from p. 44).29 Pousseur disavows a simplistic rationalism, following Bachelard, but nonetheless maintains that it is not enough for a composer simply to create music. The “scientific state of mind” dictates an integrated creative and scientifically rational research program that through speculative thought projects new musical possibilities. Taken as a whole, Pousseur’s “Outline of a Method” demonstrates this integrated creative and research program. It includes an extensive discussion of Pousseur’s Quintet in Memory of Anton Webern, framing the discussion around “problems and solutions” and relating the technical details of the piece to Pousseur’s previous Symphonies à Quinze Instruments and Webern’s Quartet, op. 22.30 The language of Pousseur’s article is sprinkled with terms that in both English and German sonically project an association with science and mathematics, such terms as morphological/ morphologische, parameter, chronometric/chronometrische, and harmonic fields/harmonischen felder. The associations suggested by such terms and the insistence on a musical design steeped in a logic viable within a scientific paradigm allowed composers to advance an argument of value against critics who would claim a lack of order in their music—a claim born of the force and momentum of tonal hearing.31 In the United States this yoking of composition and analysis had an additional motivation. The entry of music studies, and particularly the study of music composition, into colleges and universities after 1945 necessitated on one hand, a rationale for its inclusion in the higher educational system and on the other, a corresponding discursive mode that would conform to intellectual trends at mid-century. In their inaugural editorial for Perspectives of New Music, Berger and Boretz promised a discourse about music that was “serious” and “deep” and that used “sophisticated methods” (Berger and Boretz, 1962, 4). To affirm such sophistication, the first volume included a “Scientific Evaluation of Die Reihe” by John Backus, then an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Southern California. Backus’s review is unforgiving: the writing of Die Reihe is a “microscopic

“Modern” Music Analysis  29 residuum consisting of nothing more than a mystical belief in numerology as the fundamental basis for music” (Backus 1962, 171). At the same time, Backus bases his evaluation on “scientific competence” and “scientific criteria” (Backus 1962, 161). In other words, science remains the evaluative measure of theoretical and analytical truth and the writing of Die Reihe falls short. Such a critique of what was taken as “pseudo-science” would certainly have had resonance within the broader U.S culture. In a chapter on the UFO craze of the 1950s and 60s in Science Talk: Changing Notions of Science in American Popular Culture, historian Daniel Thurs shows how some in the scientific community argued against those who advocated for the reality of UFOs by constructing a notion of pseudo-science. Since the case for UFOs often engaged “science talk,” it was necessary to build “far stronger and less permeable rhetorical boundaries” that created a clear sense of what was and was not scientific32 (Thurs 2007, 123–4). In his evaluation, Backus used a similar approach: he constructed boundaries separating “real” from “pseudo” science. Milton Babbitt also affirmed the necessity of the scientific discursive model in his 1965 article, “The Structure and Function of Musical Theory”: … there is no doubt that … musical discourse or—more precisely—the theory of music should be subject to the methodological criteria of scientific method and the attendant scientific language. (Babbitt 2003d, 13) Babbitt’s route to such a position may be traced both to his training in mathematics and his embrace of analytical philosophy at mid-century. But the philosophical ground for a link between art and science may be found in the notion of what some four decades earlier the Vienna Circle philosophers conceived as “unified science.” Coming together in the 1920s from science, philosophy, and sociology, the members of the Vienna Circle envisioned, as Peter Galison has observed, a “modern and scientific” movement that would embrace all forms of knowledge—from the traditional sciences, to the humanities, to the arts—under the principles of science (Galison 1990, 713). In a 1929 lecture to the architects and artists at the Dessau Bauhaus, one of the Vienna philosophers, Rudolf Carnap, declared: “I work in science, and you in visible forms; the two are only different sides of a single life” (Galison 1990, 710, Galison’s translation). Both the creators of the Bauhaus and the Vienna Circle philosophers understood art and science as part of a single “modern ‘form of life,’” related by the process of knowledge construction. Such a process entailed a “building up from simple elements to all higher forms, that would, by virtue of the systematic constructional program itself, guarantee the exclusion of the decorative, mystical, or metaphysical” (Galison 1990, 710–11). This vision of a unified science found a telling modernist expression in the interior design for the family house in Vienna that Ludwig Wittgenstein created to complement the exterior design

30  Part I by the architect Paul Englemann.33 As Galison reports, Wittgenstein’s sister, Hermine Wittgenstein, described the finished house, in both its exterior and interior details, as “logic become house”—a single principle serving multiple roles (Galison 1990, 727). Babbitt’s embrace of analytical philosophy generally may be observed not only in his vision for the conduct of music theory and analysis but also in the several references to specific philosophers in his writings.34 For Babbitt, the very survival of music and of the contemporary composer depends on the adoption by composers and music scholars of the vision espoused in the concept of “unified science.” In “The Structure and Function of Music Theory,” Babbitt writes: Perhaps there have been eras in the musical past when discourse about music was not a primary factor in determining what was performed, published, therefore disseminated, and therefore composed, and when the criteria of verbal rigor could not be inferred from either discourse in other areas or from the study of the methodology of discourse, when—indeed—the compositional situation was such as not to require that knowing composers make fundamental choices and decisions that require eventual verbal formulation, clarification, and to an important extent resolution. But the problems of our time certainly cannot be expressed in or discussed in what has passed generally for the language of musical discourse, that language in which the incorrigible personal statement is granted the grammatical form of an attributative proposition, and in which negation—therefore—does not produce a contradiction; that wonderful language which permits anything to be said and virtually nothing to be communicated. (Babbitt 2003d, 11; my emphasis) For Babbitt savvy composers must control the discourse about their music in order to assure its performance and publication. And in order to avoid the “incorrigible” subjectivity of past discourse, they must adhere to the rigor defined by scientific method in their verbal formulations of compositional method.35 But even further, Babbitt envisions a type of musical creation in which a rigorous analytical-theoretical discourse inhabits musical sound itself: music and its logical formulation are linked as a “single modern form of life.” As in the architecture of the Bauhaus and the philosophy of the Vienna Circle—both of which give specific visual and conceptual shape to an underlying constructivist and science-based logic—music for Babbitt must give sonorous shape to these principles. And in order to do so, music analytical-theoretical writings are a necessary component of the creative process. In addition to this yoking of the creative project to analytical-theoretical research, the trace of scientific authority may be observed from various additional perspectives which will take my discussion to the values and

“Modern” Music Analysis  31 ideas that underlie the thought and practices of mid-century composertheorists and then to a consideration of the specific concepts and methods that characterized the resulting music analysis and theory. I build upon what Theodore Brown terms the “epistemic” or “expert” authority of science, which consists of the “capacity [of science] to convince others of how the world is” (Brown 2009, 23). The remainder of this chapter turns to the underlying values and ideas, while the following chapter explores in some detail specific instances of analytical-theoretical writing. Many of the values and ideas that motivated composers at mid-century echo those that run through a 1945 report by Vannevar Bush titled “Science: The Endless Frontier.” This influential document, commissioned by Franklin Roosevelt, led to the establishment of the National Science Foundation (1950) and to the growth of governmental funding of basic science research in subsequent years. From one pithy sentence a number of themes may be observed: “Scientific progress … results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in a manner dictated by their curiosity for the exploration of the unknown” (Bush 1945).36 Bush pairs the ideas of progress and the unknown into a broader ideal of limitless possibility— the “endless frontier.” These ideas are pervasive throughout the writings of composer-theorists at mid-century. In his aptly titled “Past and Present Concepts of the Nature and Limits of Music,” Babbitt imagines a musical world limited only by the physical capacities of the body and links the idea of limits in music to the physical sciences: “The limits of music reside ultimately in the perceptual capacities of the human receptor, just as the scope of physical science is delimited by the perceptual and conceptual capacities of the human observer” (Babbitt 2003c, 84). And in reference to the link between speculative theory and musical composition, Babbitt observes that “music theory … can provide the basis for unprecedented musical utterances …” (Babbitt 2003). Likewise, Boulez muses on the impetus that speculative thought about music serves for “the future development of musical thought” and on the possibility of a “new universe that cannot be discovered without accidents and errors” (Boulez 1971, 29, 33). Another theme from Bush’s “Endless Frontier” report involves the freedom and autonomy of the research scientist. Babbitt’s notorious position in 1958 High Fidelity article spins out this theme. Arguing that the advanced composer should be “free to pursue a private life of professional achievement, as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism,” Babbitt recommends the university as a place free from market pressures. In such a place, the creation of a “genuinely original composition … contributes to the sum of knowledge” in the same way that any speculative research advances knowledge (Babbitt 2003b, 53–54). The idealized view of the scientist as an autonomous and disinterested seeker of truth that runs through Bush’s report is repeated by others in the 50s and 60s. Another important philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi, emphasizes the value of seclusion in the university. In a 1962 article, “The

32  Part I Republic of Science,” Polanyi writes: “… the general public cannot participate in the general milieu in which discoveries are made. Discovery comes only to a mind immersed in its pursuit. For such work the scientist needs a secluded place among like-minded colleagues who keenly share his aims …” (Polanyi 2000, 74). Taking on the mantle of the research scientist, Babbitt is not concerned about the “whistling repertory of the man on the street” but rather with exploring the “variety of universes of diverse [compositional] practices” (Babbitt 2003b, 54, 49). As is now well known, the original title of Babbitt’s article was “The Composer as Specialist.” Despite the playful suggestion of “composer as anachronism” as an alternate title, the article is largely devoted to justifying a new model of the composer as an expert—a specialist—whose knowledge exceeds that of the “layman.” That the musical expertise of the composer makes his music incomprehensible to the broader public is justifiable on the grounds that his advanced musical work in composition, analysis, and theory assures musical progress. Such specialization was the norm for the sciences, understood as the consequence of expert culture, but it often leads to the situation in which “scientists find it difficult to have meaningful talks about scientific topics with scientists in other fields” (Brown 2009, 100). Another impetus toward specialization in science involves the need to establish borders between science and non-science, often through the use of specialized concepts and methods. As Thomas Gieryn points out, such boundaries are “discursively construct[ed]” and serve to establish the “epistemic authority of science”37 (Gieryn 1999, xi–xii). In valorizing the “layman’s” inability to “whistle” the tunes of the new music, Babbitt constructs a boundary between “advanced” and “traditional” music like that of the boundary scientists establish between science and non-science. The boundaries separating advanced music from the mundane assure the composer as specialist a justifiably isolated place in which the limitless possibilities of music may be explored. One of the primary determinants of the epistemic authority of science is the claim for rational and disinterested methods of research, which entail observation and empirical investigation, the development of explanatory models, and the verifiability of empirical findings. Because these methodological principles assure objectivity, scientific inquiry also lays claim to the truthfulness of its observations, explanations, and predictions. Boulez’s definition of what he calls an “‘active’ analytical method” is framed around the general principles of the scientific method: It must begin with the most minute and exact observation possible of the musical facts confronting us; it is then a question of finding a plan, a law of internal organization which takes into account of these facts with the maximum coherence; finally comes the interpretation of the compositional laws deduced from this special application. All these stages are necessary; one’s studies are of merely technical interest if

“Modern” Music Analysis  33 they are not followed through to the highest point—the interpretation of the structure. (Boulez 1971, 18, Boulez’s emphasis) As mentioned previously, Babbitt approaches scientific rationality through the lens of analytic philosophy. His commitment to contemporary thought about the nature of scientific explanation at mid-century is evidenced by his reliance on the work of Carl Hempel, a prominent philosopher of science, in the 1961 essay “Past and Present Concepts of the Nature and Limits of Music.” In arguing for the necessary bond between musical possibilities (i.e., limits) to “statements about music,” Babbitt quotes Hempel, who links “concept formation” to “theory formation in science.” Hempel’s thinking about scientific explanation provides the foundation for Babbitt’s critique of past music theories and for a model of an objective music theory that avoids the “incorrigible statement of attitude” (Babbitt 2003c, 79).38 And Ernst Krenek, in his 1960 article “The Extents and Limits of Serial Technique,” extends the need for objectivity to the compositional process itself. He writes: Actually the composer has come to distrust his inspiration because it is not really as innocent as it was supposed to be, but rather conditioned by a tremendous body of recollection, tradition, training, and experience. In order to avoid the dictations of such ghost, he prefers to set up an impersonal mechanism which will furnish, according to premeditated patterns, unpredictable situations. (Krenek 1962, 90) For composer-theorists at mid-century, the use of procedures deriving in some sense from scientific methods assured a broader cultural viability to the new music enterprise.39 In the writings of composer-theorists at mid-century, the concept of musical structure and the production of speculative theory are dominant themes, both of which reflect the epistemic authority of science. Inge Kovács has observed that composers moved away from a concept of form and toward a concept of structure: “Especially since the classical form tradition appeared as unbearably anachronistic, one sought in its place a systematic penetration into the plane of structure”40 (Kovács 2004, 247; my translation). Not simply a repudiation of traditional form, a focus on structure afforded composers an association with science and a progressive aesthetic trajectory. The turn toward structure is evident in both the compositional and analytical-theoretical work of the composer-theorist at mid-century, and as an abstract concept, structure was necessarily linked to the empirical engagement with music that was analysis. As already noted, Boulez, in one of his Darmstadt lectures, lays out the centrality of analytical engagement with music, and then later in that essay quotes approvingly the French

34  Part I philosopher Louis Rougier whose comments on structure Boulez deems relevant to music: “‘What we can know of the world is its structure, not its essence. We think of it in terms of relationships and function, not of substances and accidents” (Boulez 1971, 32).41 The focus on structure rather than form allowed composers to emphasize the newness and originality of their music since each structure could take on unique features. In step with the prevailing modernist aesthetic, the invention of ever new structures through analysis and speculative theory allowed for an “endless frontier” of musical composition. The focus on structures discovered through speculative analyticaltheoretical work was a progressive enterprise, like science, since the goal of such work was to open up new musical possibilities, new musical frontiers. For Boulez, “speculations” about “contemporary musical thought [should be put] on a completely and infallibly valid basis” in order to “give impetus to the future development of musical thought” (Boulez 1971, 29). And for Babbitt, the musical future is bound to the development of formal theories, which result in “new cognitions” that follow from the “logical truths of the formal system” and which are limited only by the “perceptual capacities of the human receptor” (capacities not to be confused with the “conditioning of prior perceptions” as Babbitt reminds) (Babbitt 2003b, 50). The emphasis on structure as a speculative and hence abstract concept in the work of the composer-theorist at mid-century allows a distinction between two differing conceptions of musical theory. On one hand, theory defines how to create a work (a “recipe” in Boulez’s term; Boulez 1971, 142–3) or it is a “hypothesis” (to use Babbitt’s term; Babbitt 2003b, 50) about compositional intention, and on the other hand, theory is a speculation about new structural possibilities and hence necessarily abstract. Composer-theorists were mostly engaged in the latter sort of theoretical enterprise and in doing so aligned their work with scientists engaged in pure or basic research in the university, not with those engaged in the applied work of creating new technologies. Thus, by promoting the abstractions of speculative musical thought, the composer-theorists aligned themselves with the progressive ideals of pure research and not with the practical and hence social domains of technology. Writing sometime after the period in question, Robert Morgan, in his 1977 “On the Analysis of Recent Music,” observed that in the postwar years there was a “tendency for each piece to define, for its own unique purposes, a purely individual system with a validity thereby reduced to defining the characteristics of a single compositional structure” (Morgan 1977, 39). In other words music is its structure. Boulez articulates this identification by arguing against a distinction between form and content, citing anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss as evidence: “in music there is no opposition between form and content, between abstract on the one hand and concrete on the other. Form and content are of the same nature, subject to the same analytical jurisdiction”42 (Boulez 1971, 32). To analyze the structure then is to analyze the content.

“Modern” Music Analysis  35 This identification of form and content may be traced as well to thought of the Vienna Circle and the Bauhaus in the interwar period. As mentioned earlier, the Vienna Circle philosophers articulated a constructionist vision of “unified science” in which “all knowledge … would be built up from logical strings of basic experiential propositions” (Galison 1990, 713). The logic of this constructionist view of knowledge would assure no distinction between form and content since the building-up depended on the consistency between the simple and the more complex. And as Galison points out: “a manifest building up from simple elements to all higher forms … would by virtue of the systematic constructional program itself, guarantee the exclusion of the decorative, mystical, or metaphysical” (Galison 1990, 710). While the Vienna Circle philosophers and Bauhaus artists worked in the interwar period, their ideas and attitudes left a strong imprint on the music and thought of the postwar composers. In the U.S. Babbitt’s emphasis on the “efficiency” of the new musical language and his insistence on logical consistency that marries concept and music bears the stamp of logical positivist thought (Babbitt 2003, 49 and passim). And in Western Europe, Boulez would argue for the validity of music that is “reduced to a formal self-sufficient system” (Boulez 1986, 98).43 As the preceding discussion has shown, the epistemic authority of science runs throughout both the compositional and theoretical-analytical thought of composer-theorists in the postwar years. And significant for the present context, this authority underlies the yoking of the creative project to analytical-theoretical research: the compositional muse was analytical inquiry and theoretical speculation. The growing importance of analysis and theory within the broader context of contemporary music-making and scholarship led to various discussions and sometimes debates about their function and purpose. Brief consideration of some of these discussions and debates provides insight into the issues that helped to shape the newly defined practices of analysis and its theory-twin. The fervor that permeated both the compositions and writings of this new generation of composer-theorists in the postwar years caught the attention of people outside the professional world of musicians and music scholars. The philosopher Stanley Cavell devoted an entire chapter in his 1969 book Must We Mean What We Say? to developments in avant-garde music.44 Launching the chapter, “Music Discomposed,” from a reading of the articles in Die Reihe and Perspectives of New Music, Cavell includes, among other topics, a critique of the relation between the writings and the new music. Cavell asserts that since the writings serve as its philosophy, the new music “cannot be criticized, as traditional art is criticized, but must be defended, or rejected, as art altogether” (Cavell 1976, 196, Cavell’s emphasis). For Cavell then, the intertwining of the creative project with analytical-theoretical research creates an untenable art since the associated analytical-theoretical writing precludes not just a formal criticism but any critical response.45

36  Part I Writing in Perspectives of New Music in 1969, Leo Treitler addresses the “crisis” issue surrounding new music in the postwar years, linking it not to any particular problem with music itself but rather to the teleological models that underlie much of the historical writing on music. But not only in histories of music, Treitler observes a teleology of another sort in the writings of Perspectives of New Music itself, and in particular he points to analytical writing that “becomes a necessary companion piece to the work itself. … the analyst issu[ing] a certificate of workmanship (or perhaps something closer to a patent application in which it is stated what the invention proposes to do, how it proposes to do it, and that it has not been done before).” Further, Treitler points out: the necessity of the analysis-work pairing effectively defines the piece through the “history of its making” and hence through the “intentions of the composer” (Treitler 1969, 5–6). So, for Treitler the new music is not only its structure but it is the structure as the composer intended it. A three-part exchange between Edward Cone and David Lewin in Perspectives of New Music illuminates changing thought about the role and goals of analysis in particular. In his 1967 “Beyond Analysis,” Cone refutes an implication in contemporary analytical writing that “nothing about composition. … is beyond analysis,” arguing instead that issues of value and preference—what he calls the “I like it”—are necessarily inexplicable. Further he criticizes “young composers” for being “either insensitive to nonanalytical values or … afraid to admit their importance. As a result they seem to be writing, not about actual compositions, but about abstractions derived from compositions” (Cone 1967, 51).46 As a strong and early advocate of analysis, Cone chafes against some of the directions the new practice takes: speculative theory and abstraction, among them. David Lewin responds in print some eighteen months later, arguing that Cone fails to distinguish clearly the distinct activities of analysis, theory, and criticism. For Lewin analysis is directed at the “individuality of the specific piece of music,” theory at the “way composers and listeners appear to have accepted sound as conceptually structured, categorically prior to any one piece,” and criticism as the question of what “engages” a listener (Lewin 1969, 61–64). Concerned that some will read Cone’s article to mean that analyticaltheoretical study is not relevant for composers, Lewin affirms its “pedagogical value … for composers” because such study “provides [them] with a habit of immediate qualification of [their] critical impressions in technical terms” (Lewin 1969, 65). Lewin maintains that analysis, theory, and criticism are intricately linked (analysis depends on some prior theoretical context, theory-making depends on some analytical engagement with musical sound, and all analysis entails a critical response) but insists on their distinction at the point at which some person is engaged in the activity of doing analysis, constructing a theory, or writing a critique. Cone’s reply, appearing immediately after Lewin’s response, takes issue with some of the details of Lewin’s characterizations of the proper spheres of analysis, theory,

“Modern” Music Analysis  37 and criticism, strengthening the sense in which it is often difficult to tease them apart as separate domains of inquiry. But for each the distinctions and interrelations between analysis, theory, and criticism emerge as central themes within the context of a discussion of analysis. In the late 1960s, writings elucidating the relations of analysis to compositional practice, either in pedagogical or creative terms, and to theory and criticism helped to foster interest in defining it as a self-standing practice. While many others played important roles, Edward Cone, through his several articles focused on analysis, and David Lewin, in his debate with Cone, laid the foundation on which analysis as a distinct and significant mode of inquiry could be constructed. The postwar context out of which analysis emerged was one which posed the analytical-theoretical enterprise as a necessary accompaniment to the creative project, and it is this context that defined how analysis was conducted, what it observed, how it was articulated, and what its goals were. However, the practice of analysis and theory did not remain within the province of the composer-theorist. The prominence and vibrancy of much of the analytical-theoretical writing in the postwar years eventually attracted scholars who didn’t necessarily function as composer-theorists. As Patrick McCreless has observed, the advent of “professional music theory” as a distinct field of musical inquiry—a field embracing musical analysis as he notes—occurs around 1960 in the United States (McCreless 1997, 15). The beginning of this field of study in the United States is accompanied by the formation of journals and degree programs, and eventually in the formation of the Society for Music Theory in 1976. In Britain a new journal, Music Analysis, is established in 1982; in 1987–88 three books devoted to defining analysis are published; and then in 1992 the Society for Music Analysis is formed.47 As Robert Wason observes in a recent article about “practical” theory: “The teaching of practical music theory to students—hitherto the domain of composers and performers in most conservatories and universities—was increasingly taken over by scholars who were trained within the growing number of Ph.D. programs where degrees in music theory were offered” (Wason 2002, 72). My claim here is that the practice of music analysis and its twin theory that circulates today still bears the trace of the context out of which it was initially defined: that of the composer-theorist who linked analytical-theoretical research to the creative project. Further, I contend, the speculative theory that was and has been produced betrays its underlying creative and technical goals in its concepts and methods and that those concepts and methods themselves are heavily indebted to the epistemic authority of science at mid-century. Far from being an indictment of past or present practices of analysis and/or theory, my assertions serve as another step in the critique of a maturing practice, one that understands its history and its role within the larger practice of music scholarship, performance, composition, and apprehension.48

38  Part I The conflation of speculative theory with the technical concerns of creation may still be observed in the productive results of analytical and theoretical investigation even though the practical connection to composition is no longer engaged. That is, the practical image of craft is sedimented in notions of musical structure in ways that are specific to the high modernism of the postwar years when the contemporary practices of analysis and theory were developed. My goal here is to historicize the practices of analysis in order to suggest other ways that its knowledge-building impetus might be realized. notes 1. Initiated by scholars in Great Britain, the journal Music Analysis began publishing in 1982 and the Society for Music Analysis began in 1992. In the United States, the Society for Music Theory, which typically encompasses music analysis, was formed in 1977. See the following books for more additional information on the practices of music theory and analysis: Bent 1980 and 1987, Cook 1987, and Dunsby and Whittall 1988. Bent’s 1987 Analysis was a slightly expanded version of the prior New Grove Encyclopedia article from 1980. In the current Grove Music Online, Bent and Pople give a brief account of the maturing of music analysis: “The period after 1970 saw analysis emerge as a recognized discipline within musical studies, comprising a number of approaches and methods.” Bent and Pople 2014. 2. The debates about music analysis and theory have been at times intense, and they often took their definition from larger musicological concerns, such as the “secession” of the theorists from the American Musicological Society and the advent of the so-called New Musicology. These debates often entailed criticism of music theoretical and analytical work for its lack of historical context and its hidden aesthetic and ideological perspectives. A sampling of articles since 1980 includes: Agawu 1996, Kerman 1980, McClary 1989, Solie 1980–1, Tomlinson 1993, Treitler 1982. 3. Inge Kovács contends that there is a strong connection between linguistic structuralism and compositional concerns with structure in the immediate years following World War II in her Wege zum musikalischen Strukturalismus. René Leibowitz, Pierre Boulez, John Cage und die Webern-Rezeption in Paris um 1950 (Kovács 2004). My argument focuses on the authority of science during this time period and does not contradict Kovács’s claim. Rather I understand the authority of science as the broader phenomenon which includes linguistic structuralism. 4. Carl Dahlhaus has written on the concept of “new” music and its political ramifications: see Dahlhaus 1987. Also, M.J. Grant discusses the concept of the “new” in relation to the “Zero Hour” in postwar Europe: see Grant 2001. 5. Rightly this list should include John Cage as one of the originators of “new” music. However since Cage played no role in promoting and defining the practice of music analysis (as well as music theory in its current form), I have not included him. While promoting the various types of indeterminacy, Cage was persistent in advocating a rigorous and often systematic musical structure.

“Modern” Music Analysis  39 Kovács 2004 makes a similar observation, noting the importance of musical structure for both Cage and Boulez, linking both to the importance of linguistic structuralism in Paris at mid-century. 6. In recent years a number of articles and books have been produced that document the events in Darmstadt, including the significance of its location in Germany. The largest and most significant project is the four-volume study and documentation of first twenty years of the summer courses: Borio and Danuser 1997. Others include: a volume of the Contemporary Music Review, Attinello, Fox, and Iddon 2007, Borio 1993, and Grant 2001. 7. Adorno’s participation at Darmstadt is detailed in Borio 1987. Various authors discuss the impact of Adorno’s thought on the Darmstadt and other composers: see Leppert 2002, 15–16 and Paddison 1993, 265. 8. Borio and Danuser provide details on the programming of events during the Darmstadt Summer Courses, showing the types of involvements of participants from 1946–66. See Borio and Danuser 1997, 99–116. 9. Steinecke also began a proceedings journal, the Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, in 1958 (Steinecke 1958–1992). Boulez published some lectures as Boulez 1971[1963] and others appeared some years later in Boulez 1986. Nono originally published his essays in various places, and they are now all appear in Nono 1975. 10. Kovács discusses the importance of Webern’s compositional practice for composers in Europe in the 1950s: Kovács 2004. See also Grant (2001, 103) for additional perspectives on the significance of Webern for the Darmstadt composers. 11. The Americans included John Cage, Christian Wolff, and John Whitney. 12. Broadly similar kinds of events occurred at UC Berkeley and Yale University during this period of time. I have chosen to concentrate on events at Princeton University because Milton Babbitt epitomizes post–World War II musical endeavors and because the activities surrounding the publication of Perspectives of New Music, a journal started largely in response to Die Reihe, were centered in Princeton, New Jersey. Patrick McCreless, in a narrative about how “music theory” emerged from musicology during roughly the same time period as my narrative about analysis, focuses on events at Yale University. See McCreless 1997. 13. Sessions taught at Princeton from 1936–45 and then again from 1953–65, teaching at University of California at Berkeley in the interim years. 14. Babbitt had taught music at Princeton in the late 1930s while it was still a “Program in Music” in the Department of Art and Archaeology. From 1943– 45, Babbitt served as a member of the Mathematics Department. See the brief history that is available through the Princeton University library: http://diglib. princeton.edu/ead/getEad?eadid=AC151&kw= 15. At Princeton, the PhD in music history was instituted in 1951, and that in composition some ten years later in 1961. 16. See Babbitt’s account of the titling of this article in Babbitt 1991, 15. 17. It is worth pointing out that there had been journals devoted to contemporary music prior to Perspectives in New Music. In particular, Modern Music, edited by Minna Lederman, was published from 1924–46 in conjunction with the League of Composers. There is no indication that the founding of Perspectives was to fill the void left by the cessation Modern Music. 18. Die Reihe ceased publication in 1962.

40  Part I 19. The idea that a piece of music “works”—as in “how does it work”—assumes a prior evaluative stance of “works well.” This observation has been made by Kerman 1980 and Treitler 1982 and I will take it up shortly. But for present purposes, I’ll just consider the term in its operative sense. 20. In fact, one could argue that since no single compositional technique was dominant at mid-century, the only way to teach composition was to demonstrate what makes past music “work well” and to generalize from those observations. 21. The history of the import of Schenker’s theories to the United States has received considerable scholarly attention in the last ten years. The first advocates of Schenker had studied with him in Vienna before emigrating to the United States due to the rise of Naziism and included Hans Weisse, Felix Salzer, and Oswald Jonas. See David Carson Berry 2003 and 2005 for an overview of the history of Schenkerian theory in the United States, which also provides bibliographic links to other such historical accounts. Another reason for the success of Schenkerian theory in the United States might be traced to the cultural value of its European imprint, still in mid-twentieth century American society. 22. Sessions own interest in affirming a link between theory and composition arises in how he understands Schenker’s contribution as “effecting some kind of rapprochement between musical theory and the actual musical thought of the composer.” (Sessions 1979a, 323) 23. Writing later in 1991, Babbitt reflects on the impact of Schenkerian theory: “There was another powerful influence on our thinking, our rethinking about the music of the past, an influence which landed and settled in this country at about the same time as Schoenberg’s …” See Babbitt 1991, 10–11. 24. I use the term “analytical” to refer to philosophical currents in the United States after World War II. The Analytical tradition built upon the philosophy of the Logical Empiricists in Europe. 25. This focus on a rational discourse in and about music also fit within the antiRomantic discourse in the 1920s and 30s. 26. As is well known, scientific developments in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries have led to great destruction. I mention the positive views of scientific discoveries here since it was these that shaped musical discourse. 27. For more on the history of science funding in the postwar era and through 1984, see David Dickson, The New Politics of Science (Dickson 1984). And on how the Russian launching of Sputnik affected science policy, see pages 27–29 in particular. 28. I have no pretensions toward comprehensibility in this discussion of how “science” affected musical practices. Rather, my goal is to establish how the model of science affected the development of a concept of analysis. One could point to several other manifestations of “scientific authority” in postwar musical practice. These include: the description of John Cage’s music as “experimental” and the development of and fascination with electronic music. I choose to focus on events at Darmstadt and Princeton largely because they are well-documented in the journals that are associated with each not because the developments at these places were unique. 29. The term that Bachelard used in his writings on the philosophy of science was “surrationalisme.” The concept appears most fully developed in his 1940 The Philosophy of No. The translator of The Philosophy of No, G. C. Waterston, chose in 1968 to translate the term as “surrationalism” since “it seems to be

“Modern” Music Analysis  41 Bachelard’s intention to link surrationalisme with literary and artistic surrealism.” (Waterston 1968, ix) This translation has become standard in recent scholarship on Bachelard. See also Daniel McArthur 2002 for Bachelard’s concept of “surrationalism.” Pousseur does not indicate what writings of Bachelard he is invoking. He may well have known The Philosophy of No or might also have had in mind Bachelard’s 1934 and better known book The New Scientific Spirit. (Bachelard 1984 and 1968) 30. In this essay Pousseur also discusses several other of his own works, linking them to his analytical observations on other works by Webern. 31. It is interesting to note that in a post-tonal sound world of mid-century John Cage embraced “chaos” and the “irrational” as positive forces of musical significance, while those adopting a science-like model offered proof of “structure” as a counter to charges of disorder. Both of these ways of framing a discourse about music may be understood as responses to negative accounts by critics and listeners alike. 32. As an indication of the strengths of attitudes surrounding the proper conduct of science, Thurs also cites the case of physicist Edward Condon who criticized the appearance of “scientific pornography.” (Thurs 2007, 123) 33. The Wittgenstein house, also known as the Stonborough House, was completed between 1926–28. 34. The most frequently cited philosophers in Babbitt’s writings are Rudolf Carnap, a central member of the Vienna Circle, W. V. Quine and Nelson Goodman, a United States philosopher of the Analytical tradition, and Carl Hempel, a philosopher of science. 35. Marion Guck offers a thoroughgoing critique of Babbitt’s phrase “incorrigible personal statement” in her “Rehabilitating the Incorrigible.” (Guck 1994). 36. See Brown 2009, 86–92 and Dickson 1984, 25–33 for more on the history and consequences of this report. 37. The issue of boundaries in establishing science from non-science is also discussed in Thurs 2007. He focuses his discussion around debates about phrenology, evolution, relativity, UFOs, and intelligent design. 38. Babbitt’s 1961 “Past and Present Concepts of the Nature and Limits of Music” (Babbitt 2003c) and 1965 “The Structure and Function of Musical Theory” (2003d) while not identical have some overlaps in content. 39. Thurs discusses the cultural role of the scientific method in the 20th century in his chapter on UFOs. (Thurs 2007, 123–158.) 40. The German is: “Insbesondere die klassische Form-tradition erschien als unerträglich anachronistisch, und man suchte nach wegen einer systematischen Durchdringung der Strukturebene.” Kovács also links the turn toward structure to the influence of structuralism in Paris through not only Lévi-Strauss but also through the work of structural linguists such as Roman Jakobson. 41. Rougier (1889–1982) was a French philosopher who was the only French philosopher who was associated with the Vienna Circle. Boulez does not indicate the source of the quotation. 42. Boulez quotes Lévi-Strauss in the next sentence but does not indicate the source: “‘The content … draws its reality from its structure, and what we call form is the structural disposition of local structures, in other words of the content.’” (Boulez 1971, 32)

42  Part I 43. As far as I can tell, Boulez is not quoting anyone in particular here. I extract the position he is defending and state it positively, but he writes the phrase as if someone is writing it as a criticism. The analytical concepts of Heinrich Schenker also resonate with some aspects of the constructivist model of the Vienna Circle philosophers. Schenker’s “background level” may be understood as the smallest element, a pure structure without ornament. 44. Cavell is a trained musician, having gotten an undergraduate degree in music from UC Berkely and completing some graduate-level training at Juilliard. The chapter addressing music was written between 1960–65, the work coming out of two conferences. See pp. xi–xii of Cavell 1976 for more details. 45. In a similar way, Susan Sontag claims, in her essay “Against Interpretation,” that pop and minimalist art was created in order to defy or preclude interpretation. The situation with the new music of the 1950s and 60s is somewhat different according to Cavell in that it offered its own interpretation via structural analysis with the goal of precluding critical response. See Sontag 1966. 46. It is worth noting that Cone’s article was developed from a lecture he gave at the 1967 Summer Institute of Compositional Studies of the American Society of University Composers. (Cone 1967, 33). 47. The three books on analysis are: Bent 1987, Cook 1987, and Dunsby and Whitall 1988. 48. McCreless frames this disciplinary maturing around “theory” rather than analysis. See McCreless 1997.

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“Modern” Music Analysis  43 ———. 2003d [1965]. “The Structure and Function of Musical Theory.” College Music Society 5: 49–60. Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, edited by Stephen Peles, with Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, and Joseph N. Straus, 190–201. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bachelard, Gaston. 1968 [1940]. The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind. Translated by G. C. Waterston. New York: Orion Press. ———. 1984 [1934]. The New Scientific Spirit. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon Press. Backus, John. 1962. “Die Reihe: A Scientific Evaluation.” Perspectives of New Music 1/1: 160–171. Barnes, Barry, and David Edge, eds. 1982. Science in Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Bent, Ian. 1980. “Analysis.” New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan Publishers Limited. Bent, Ian, with William Drabkin. 1987. Analysis. New York: Norton. Bent, Ian D. and Anthony Pople. 2014. “Analysis.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed 25 October 2014. http://www. oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/41862. Berger, Arthur, and Benjamin Boretz. 1962. “Editorial Note.” Perspectives of New Music 1: 4–5. Berry, David Carson. 2003. “Hans Weisse and the Dawn of American Schenkerism.” Journal of Musicology 20: 104–156. ———. 2005. “Schenkerian Theory in the United States: A Review of Its Establishment and a Survey of Current Research Topics.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 2: 101–137. Accessed 15 November 2014. http://www.gmth.de/ zeitschrift/artikel/pdf/206.aspx. Borio, Gianmario. 1987. “Work Structure and Musical Representation: Reflections on Adorno’s Analyses for Interpretation.” Translated by Martin Iddon. Contemporary Music Review 26: 53–75. ———. 1993. Musikalische Avantgarde um 1960. Laaber: Laaber–Verlag. Borio, Gianmario, and Hermann Danuser. 1997. Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Inter­ nationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–66. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach GmbH Druck- und Verlagshaus. Volumes 1–4. Boulez, Pierre. 1971 [1963]. “Musical Technique.” Boulez on Music Today. Translated by Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1986. Orientations. Edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez; Translated by Martin Cooper. London: Faber and Faber. Brown, Theodore. 2009. Imperfect Oracle: The Epistemic and Moral Authority of Science. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. Bush, Vannevar. 1945. Science, the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President. Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/ nsf50/vbush1945.htm. Accessed 15 November 2014. Cavell, Stanley. 1976 [1969]. “Music Discomposed.” In Must We Mean What We Say?, 180–212. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cone, Edward T. 1948. “The Creative Artist in the University.” College Art Journal 7: 177–83. ———. 1962. “Analysis Today.” In Problems of Modern Music, edited by Paul Henry Lang, 34–50. New York: Norton.

44  Part I ———. 1967. “Beyond Analysis.” Perspectives of New Music 6: 33–51. Cook, Nicholas. 1987. A Guide to Musical Analysis. London: J.M. Dent. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1987 [1969].“‘New Music’ as historical category.” In Schoenberg and the New Music. Translated by Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dickson, David. 1984. The New Politics of Science. New York: Pantheon Books. Dunsby, Jonathan, and Arnold Whitall. 1988. Music Analysis in Theory and Practice. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eimert, Herbert. 1961. “Debussy’s Jeux,” in “Reports and Analyses” 5. Translated by Leo Black and Ruth Koenig. Die Reihe, 3–21. Vienna: Universal Editions. Eimert, Herbert, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. 1955–62. Die Reihe. Volumes 1–8. Vienna: Universal Editions. Fromm, Paul. 1962. “Young Composers: Perspective and Prospect.” Perspectives of New Music 1/1 (Fall):1–3. Galison, Peter. 1990. “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism.” Critical Inquiry 16: 709–752. Gieryn, Thomas. 1999. Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grant, M. J. 2001. Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-war Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guck, Marion. 1994. “Rehabilitating the Incorrigible.” In Theory, Analysis, and Meaning in Music, edited by Anthony Pople, 57–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kerman, Joseph. 1980. “How We Got into Analysis and How to Get Out.” Critical Inquiry 7: 311–331. Kovács, Inge. 2004. Wege zum musikalischen Strukturalismus. René Leibowitz, Pierre Boulez, John Cage und die Webern-Rezeption in Paris um 1950. Schliengen: Verlag Ulrich Schmitt. Krenek, Ernst. 1962 [1960]. “The Extents and Limits of Serial Technique.” In Problems of Modern Music, edited by Paul Henry Lang, 72–94. New York: Norton. Lang, Paul Henry, ed. 1962 [1960]. Problems of Modern Music: The Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies. New York: Norton. Leppert, Richard. 2002. Introduction to Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno. Edited by Leppert, 1–82. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UC Press. Lewin, David B. 1969. “Behind the Beyond.” Perspectives of New Music 7/2 (Spring Summer): 59–69. McArthur, Daniel. 2002. “Why Bachelard is not a Scientific Realist.” The Philosophical Forum 33: 159–72. McClary, Susan. 1989. “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Composition.” Cultural Critique 12: 57–81. McCreless, Patrick. 1997. “Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory.” In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, edited by David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, Lawrence Siegel, 13–53. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Morgan, Robert. 1977. “On the Analysis of Recent Music.” Critical Inquiry 4: 33–53. Nono, Luigi. 1975. Luigi Nono: Texte Studien zu Seiner Musik. Edited by Jürg Stenzl. Zurich: Atlantis Verlag. Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

“Modern” Music Analysis  45 Polanyi, Michael. 2000 [1962]. “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory.” Minerva. 38/1:1–21. Pousseur, Henri. 1959 [1957]. “Outline of a Method” in “Musical Craftsmanship” 3. Die Reihe, edited by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen; translated by Leo Black, 44–88. Vienna: Universal Editions. Rosen, Charles. 1962. “The Proper Study of Music.” Perspectives of New Music 1: 80–88. Sessions, Roger. 1979a [1935]. “Heinrich Schenker’s Contribution.” In Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays. Edited by Edward T. Cone, 231–240. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1979b [1949]. “The Composer in the University.” In Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays. Edited by Edward T. Cone, 193–203. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1979c [1967]. “What Can Be Taught?” In Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays. Edited by Edward T. Cone, 204–230. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Solie, Ruth. 1980–1. “The Living Work: Organicism and Musical Analysis.” Nineteenth Century Music 4: 147–56. Sontag, Susan. 1966. “Against Interpretation.” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 3–14. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Steinecke, Wolfgang. 1958–1992. Darmstädter Beitäge zur neuen Musik. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne. Thurs, Daniel. 2007. Science Talk: Changing Notions of Science in American Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Tomlinson, Gary. 1993. “Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer.” And “Tomlinson Responds.” Current Musicology 53: 18–24 and 36–35. Treitler, Leo. 1969. “The Present as History.” Perspectives of New Music 7: 1–58. ———. 1982. “‘To Worship That Celestial Sound’: Motives for Analysis.” The Journal of Musicology 1: 153–70. Walters, Ronald, ed. 1997. Scientific Authority & Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Wason, Robert. 2002. “Musica Practica: Music Theory as Pedagogy.” The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, 46–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waterston, G.D. 1968. Translator’s Preface to The Philosophy of No, by Gaston Bachelard, vii–xii. New York: Orion Press.

2 What Is Musical Structure Anyway?

That music has structure is a given. But a quick review of writing about music of almost any sort reveals that the term has a broad range of meanings, uses, and functions—so broad that we might well wonder what it could possibly mean to say that music “has” structure. In the long history of music in the Western tradition, there have been countless analyses and theories of musical structure and persistent discussions about its relation to meaning, expression, affect, and so on. While these discussions of music often begin with the premise of musical structure, there is little direct discussion of what it “is.” For instance, there is no article on musical structure in Grove Music Online, or in any of the associated dictionaries, although the term appears frequently in many articles and especially in annotations to the musical examples. Several other disciplines—e.g., linguistics, biological sciences, computer sciences—do have such entries either for structure alone or as qualified by type (as for instance in “deep structure” or “data structure”). And, in the Dictionary of Sociology the entry on structure includes the observation that “Structure is generally agreed to be one of the most important but also most elusive concepts in the social sciences”(“Structure” 2012; see also Table 2.2, Quotation 1). We might well say the same thing about the concept of structure in music: it is important and yet elusive. But in music studies, unlike sociology, there has been little explicit critical thought about how a concept of musical structure operates. A full critique of the concept of structure and of its historical and current function in music studies is beyond the scope of my project here. A brief consideration of how a concept of structure operates in some recent writings about music provides the necessary grounding for my larger argument: the concept of structure and its supporting methods are due for renovation in order to engage recent musical practices of the classical tradition. This chapter has three sections. Section I samples how a concept of structure has been used in writings about music across a range of perspectives: encyclopedia articles, music theory, music history, and ethnomusicology. Restricted to writings since 1950, this sampling demonstrates that the term “structure” refers to a wide array of musical phenomena and serves more as what the sociologist William Sewell describes as an “epistemic metaphor” that “empowers what it designates” (Sewell 1992).1 Section II considers the

What Is Musical Structure Anyway?  47 concept of structure as it was framed in the Structuralist debates of the 1960s. My claim here is that the ideas of Structuralism played an influential role in the development of post–World War II music theory and analysis and that the debates within Structuralism itself provide some useful tools for considering the concept of structure in music studies. In Section III I use the observations arising from the Structuralist debates not only to historicize the concept of structure as it has been used in music studies since the midtwentieth century but also to initiate a critique of those concepts of musical structure, revisiting the music quotes of Section I. I. Structure and writings about music Occurrences of the term structure in standard reference works provide a first entry into broad-based usage of the term. While there is no dedicated article in Grove Music Online, a concept of structure plays a prominent role in both the analysis and theory articles there—the former authored by Ian Bent with Anthony Pople (Bent and Pople 2014) and the latter by Claude Palisca with Ian Bent (Palisca and Bent 2014).2 In the “Theory and Theorists” article, Palisca writes: “theory is the study of structure” which is “divided into melody, rhythm, counterpoint, harmony and form”3 (see Table 2.1, Quotation 1). Palisca describes structure by its components, using musical categories that had their genesis in the earliest instances of Western music creation and theory. He does not explain what characteristics make the phenomena in these categories structural. In “Analysis” Bent similarly links analysis to a concept of structure: the process of analysis entails the “interpretation of structures,” an interpretive act that logically is preceded by “resolution into … constituent elements” of structures and an “investigation of their functions” (see Table 2.1, Quotation 2a). Bent defines analysis both as the determination of structural units and their functions and as a higher-level explanatory act. Thus, the range of musical things that may be identified as structural is broad: from part of a work to a whole repertory of works, or from a “chord” to the “output of a composer or court” (see Table 2.1, Quotation 2b). Bent considers analysis as a kind of bottom-up empirical activity, claiming that “by comparison” the analyst “determines the structural elements and discovers … [their] functions.” Observation of “identity” is the “central analytical act” which allows for the “measurement” of degrees of “difference” or “similarity” (see Table 2.1, Quotation 2c). Through this bottom-up empirical activity of comparison then, the analyst both determines the elements and their functions and interprets them as structural. In other words, the process Bent suggests is circular—the constituent elements, their functions, and interpreted structures are codetermined. So, while comparison for identity provides some constraints on the process of analysis, structure as a concept is underdetermined.

48  Part I In these two Grove Music Online articles, the study or interpretation of structures serves as a goal for theory and analysis; yet a concept structure is not defined and the term applies to a wide array of musical events. Certainly the authors of encyclopedia articles can only accomplish so much given the restrictions of the genre. But a quick comparison to the structure article in the Dictionary of Sociology is telling (see Table 2.2, Quotation 1). This entry emphasizes “recurring pattern” and “ordered interrelationships,” drawing attention to the nature of the organization of the structural units (here social behaviors). Furthermore, there is recognition that the term structure serves a more general function, sometimes used “loosely to refer to any observable pattern.” In his comprehensive article, “A Theory of Structure,” William Sewell observes the discursive power of the concept of structure for sociology4 (Sewell 1992). He demonstrates that “structure” serves as an “epistemic metaphor of social-scientific and scientific-discourse,” and argues that it “empowers what it designates” (see Table 2.2, Quotation 2). Sewell’s observations about sociology were made over twenty years ago and were a kind of response to the Structuralist debates of the 1960s, but they have a deep relevance for my project. The discursive power of a concept of structure in music studies is implied, ironically, by its lack of definition and broad range of meanings. Sewell’s insights into sociological practice provide a useful tool for making explicit the discursive power of concepts of structure in music studies. Next I turn to articles, books, and textbooks within professional music studies in order to demonstrate some of the various meanings that the term structure has assumed from 1950 through the present. This is not an exhaustive survey, but it does sketch out the range of uses of the term ­structure. I organize these meanings around topics of ontology, epistemology, and the discursive effects of “structure” following Sewell. Full quotations are given in Table 2.1.

Ontology 1—What is Structure? In his 1969 lecture published as “On the Problem of Music Analysis,” Theodor Adorno distinguishes “formal schemata” from “structure,” invoking a distinction between the concrete and the abstract while at the same time recognizing their correlation (Adorno 1982; see Table 2.1, Quotation 3). Analysis is focused on structure, with that which lies “underneath” the concrete details. Adorno refers to this structural abstraction as the “problem” of a work, as “the paradox, so to speak, or the ‘impossible’ that every piece of music wants to make possible.” Structure, then, functions as a metaphysics of the musical work, arising from its concrete details but distinct from them. In a 1961 article on the “series,” Pierre Boulez conveys a concept of structure bearing some similarities to Adorno’s (Boulez 1968; see Table 2.1, Quotation 4). He conceives the series as a “function of intervals” which

What Is Musical Structure Anyway?  49 gives its “basic structure to the piece.” The series does not “merely give birth to vocabulary” but generates the “structure of the work.” This generative function of the series serves to “extend the structure” not as a fixed, “preexisting thing” but as an open and unique form. Writing from his perspective as a composer, Boulez approaches structure in poietic terms, as the semantic flowering of the syntactical.

Ontology 2—Oppositions For both Adorno and Boulez, “structure” is distinct from but flows from the concrete details of musical events. This position stands at odds with the accounts of structure in Bent’s and Palisca’s encyclopedia in which structure is understood to exist across all levels, from the shortest to the longest musical phenomena (see Table 2.1 quotations 1 and 2). The issue of what is and what is not structure is figured differently in Allen Forte’s 1973 The Structure of Atonal Music (Forte 1973; see Table 2.1, Quotation 5). In the Preface, Forte writes that he will focus on “fundamental components of structure,” excluding matters of orchestration that cannot stand independently as structural. In other words, Forte opposes the structural parameter of pitch to the non-structural parameter of orchestration, or more broadly, the parameter of timbre. Forte’s formulation echoes the distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects formulated explicitly by the seventeenth century philosopher John Locke—pitch, as a primary quality, is structural and timbre, as a secondary quality, is non-structural. While Forte’s opposition of structural and non-structural is an exclusionary move, some authors employ oppositions to draw other kinds of distinctions. For instance, in a passage from his 1997 Meter as Rhythm, Christopher Hasty opposes structure to process, understanding structure as static and process as temporal (Hasty 1997; see Table 2.1, Quotation 6). In his work on rhythm and the temporal becoming of music, Hasty revisits the well-trodden philosophical paths about the paradoxical aspects of temporality relating to “whole and part, unity and multiplicity, and continuity and discontinuity.” Structure is associated with the first, non-temporal term of each opposition. Structure is also frequently opposed to either musical expression or musical meaning. In his 1967 “Beyond Analysis,” Edward Cone complicates this opposition with a threefold distinction between what he calls expressive, concrete, and analytical values. For Cone, “expression implies a relationship between the work and something else,” analytical values reside in “internal structure” that is distinct from the specific—“concrete”—choices made by the composer (Cone 1967; see Table 2.1, Quotation 7). He acknowledges a relation between structure and expression but claims that analysis, which addresses “internal structure,” cannot explain expression since it entails a relation to something “beyond” structure and the concrete compositional choices. In opposing structure to expression, Cone claims that

50  Part I analysis can only address the former and that structure can be the subject of analysis apart from any consideration of expression. Leo Treitler also employs the term structure in oppositional terms in his 1982 “‘To Worship That Celestial Sound’: Motives for Analysis” (Treitler 1982; see Table 2.1, Quotation 8). From the perspective of a music historian, Treitler calls for analytic methodologies that are both “phenomenological” and “less normative,” and that address the relations of “structure and meaning.” Unlike Cone, Treitler presumes a relation between structure and meaning while maintaining the opposition. Such oppositions of structure to expression and meaning depend on establishing structure as itself lacking in expressive or meaningful significance.

Ontology 3—Origins Another ontological issue revolves around the question of origins—that is how, from whom, or from what structure arises. For instance, in his 1959 article “Schenker’s Conception of Musical Structure,” Allen Forte claims that Heinrich Schenker’s concept of musical structure is premised on an “underlying” and “fundamental organization” which controls the “surface” (Forte 1959; see Table 2.1, Quotation 9). Forte asserts the controlling function of an absent ordering principle in analogy to the Freudian unconscious. The “fundamental organization” controls the musical surface in the same way that the absent “underlying factors” of the human control the “patterns of overt behavior.” Felix Salzer, another author who played an important role in introducing Schenker’s theories in the United States, tacks more toward a cognitive concept in his 1952 textbook Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music (Salzer 1962; see Table 2.1, Quotation 10). In his concluding section, Salzer identifies the “musical intuitions”—the “innate and unconscious tendencies” —and the “musical instincts” of the “musical mind and ear” as the source of structure—those absent yet controlling origins of musical logic. He argues that training in “structural hearing” both “clarif [ies] and strengthen[s] this propensity of musical instinct …” Salzer’s claim of musical instincts resonates with Noam Chomsky’s work in transformational grammar in the 1950s, work that is grounded in a notion of innate linguistic competence.5 For Chomsky and Salzer the premise of innateness serves as a point of origin for both linguistic and musical structure.

Epistemology Issues concerning the epistemology of music are numerous and significant, deriving largely from its non-tangible existence in time and sound. These issues are central to music analytical/theoretical inquiry and encompass a broad range of topics, including: the nature and status of evidence, methodology, explanation, and representation. These topics have been the focus of

What Is Musical Structure Anyway?  51 sustained discussion in the musicological literature, and it is not my intention here to survey the broad range of approaches. Rather, my goal is to situate the musical concept of structure within some of these epistemological questions—a task that begins with a return to the two Grove Music Online articles on theory and analysis considered above. Defining theory as the “study of structure,” Palisca characterizes theoretical activity as “an act of contemplation” and theoretical method as “thoughtful observation” (Palisca and Bent 2014; see Table 2.1, Quotation 1). In the remainder of the article, Palisca surveys various historical and present ­theories of Western music, giving details about theoretical concepts.6 There is, however, scant reflection on the epistemological challenges facing the music theorist—specifically, the question of how theorists “study” musical structures of a temporal phenomenon that is both heard and performed. These epistemological challenges play a larger role in Bent’s “Analysis” article, which is perhaps inevitable since analysis is both activity and product (Bent and Pople 2014; see Table 2.1, Quotation 2). For Bent, the knowledge of structures arises from “empirical” activity that has its basis in musical perception and that entails the determination of “structural units” and the discovery of their “functions.” As part of the activity of determining and discovering the structural units the analyst compares them in a “test for identity” and “difference.” Bent recognizes the epistemological problems associated with grounding the analytical search for structure in perception by noting that the analytical activity entails a relation between “mind and musical sound,” and he recognizes the role played by one’s historical and cultural “preconceptions” in the analytical determination and discovery of structures. However, the cognitive functions of the conceptual/theoretical apparatus as a determinant of empirical observation play no explicit role in Bent’s account of the analytical discovery of structure in this encyclopedia article. Epistemological issues for music analysis and theory have been amplified by the changes in musical style in Western classical music since the early years of the twentieth century. In particular, the absence of stylistic norms and of broad-based rules of musical logic has posed a challenge for even the determination of what constitutes a musical unit. Such determinations about the structural units in these musical contexts are often deferred to intuition, to hearing, or the “music itself.”7 Work by music scholars—Hasty (1981), Zbikowski (2002), Hanninen (2012), and others—has focused specifically on the epistemological issues involved in the processes of segmentation— sometimes but not always with respect to twentieth/twenty-first century musical practices. This work is notable for the explicit attention the authors give to the criteria of segment formation, especially in relation to perceptual and cognitive functions of hearing. There isn’t, however, as much clarity about how the process of segmentation relates to a concept of musical structure. I’ll exemplify with two short examples from Hanninen and Hasty, both of whom have well-developed approaches to segmentation.

52  Part I Hanninen’s “theory of analysis” focuses on the activity of musical interpretation within the framework defined by the theory. She distinguishes three domains—the “sonic,” “contextual,” and “structural”—that provide a basis for segmentation. The “sonic” refers to “disjunctions in the attribute-values of individual sounds and silences,” “contextual” refers to work-related musical features of “repetition, equivalence, or similarity,” and structural refers to an existing “orienting theory.” Both contextual and structural criteria “partake of basic concepts in music theory … as [an] observation language” (Hanninen 2012; see Table 2.1, Quote 11). Theoretical criteria in the structural domain can only “recommend” but can’t determine a “convincing segmentation” without a confirming contextual segmentation. In Hanninen’s theory of analysis, then, structure is given by preexisting and higher-level concepts and an “observation language” is understood as distinct from the structural domain.8 Hasty conceives of the process of segmentation as in fact the process of “structural formation” (Hasty 1981; see Table 2.1, Quote 12). As musical sounds occur within a work, they form “structures” when they are “simultaneously differentiated and undifferentiated in one or more domains”—domains which for Hasty are defined contextually and include such phenomena as pitch, register, duration, set-class, and so on. While for Hanninen the structural is a given, for Hasty structure emerges from musical processes of differentiation and continuity. The activity of segmentation, or more broadly the determination of constituent elements, tends to be conceptualized as a “bottom-up” engagement with musical phenomena. Such observational approaches to the analysis of musical structure must inevitably address the question of how theory of any sort is implicated not simply in observation but in musical perception itself. There is long-standing philosophical discussion of the claims of objectivity and the nature of explanation in the empirical sciences, which has had an echo in music studies, and it is well beyond my goals here to revisit that discussion.9 Rather here I give a couple of instances in which concepts of structure are deeply implicated in higher-level concepts about music. One of the ongoing tasks for an analyst of musical structure is determining the relation of part to whole, or in other words determining how the musical details contribute to longer range musical phenomena. For instance, in his 1997 Meter as Rhythm, Christopher Hasty remarks on the specific problem of theorizing whole/part relations when dealing with rhythm as a temporal phenomenon. Further he extends this relation of part to whole to broader questions of “unity and multiplicity” and “continuity and discontinuity” (Hasty 1997; see Table 2.1, Quotation 6). Hasty’s concern for the “becoming” of musical structures prompts a thoughtful meditation on how temporal “unities,” or temporal objects, emerge from the occurring of individual events—how the whole emerges from the parts. Robert Morgan also addresses the question of unity and part/whole relations in his 2003 “The Concept of Unity and Music Analysis.” While articulating a polemical position, Morgan’s assumptions about the analysis of musical structure reveal some facets of the epistemological problem of part/whole relations.10

What Is Musical Structure Anyway?  53 He writes that the “elements” observed by the analyst “work together” to create a whole, which is “coherent”11 (Morgan 2003; see Table 2.1, Quotation 13). Further, Morgan asserts that the analytical enterprise itself is premised on the existence of “musical coherence,” and that “unity” defines a necessary relation of part to whole. Morgan claims to adopt a “weak concept of unity,” understanding it as an “analytical construct,” but at the same time, the unity of the musical structure bestows value since it affords music “sense.” For Morgan, analytical practice is premised on a concept of coherence that derives from the part/whole relation.

Discursive Effects of Structure Morgan links issues of unity, coherence, and sense-making directly to structure—music is “well-structured” if it has unity, coherence, and makes sense. In other words, there are other terms and concepts that are often inextricably linked to structure—some as synonyms and some that play a strongly evaluative role. Some of the synonyms, sprinkled throughout the quotes considered so far include: morphology, schemata, organization, and patterns. The use of evaluative terms such as “unity” and “coherence” recalls Sewell’s comments about structure as a “founding epistemic metaphor” in sociology. His claim, that “the term structure empowers what it designates,” applies equally well to music studies. Two examples from recent writings point to the “discursive power” of structure in thought about music. First, in “The Paradox of Timbre,” the ethnomusicologist Cornelia Fales observes a “timbre deafness” in Western listeners (Fales 2002; see Table 2.1, Quotation 14). Taking note of Alan Merriam’s failure to hear the timbral domain of Burundi Whispered Inanga, she gives an analytical reading of a recording of the music, focusing on the timbral domain as represented in spectrograms. As part of her assessment of the forgetting of this musical domain in Western scholarship, Fales observes that while timbre is often singled out as “an important feature of African music” it often receives little scholarly attention because of the linguistic and conceptual difficulties of both “describing timbre” and “conceptualizing it as a dynamic feature of music.” Or in other words, timbre recedes from scholarly attention because of the particular ways it challenges existing concepts of musical structure. Second, in his “Goal-Directed Soul? Analyzing Rhythmic Teleology in African American Popular Music,” Robert Fink argues against those who claim that groove-based popular music is static—which in this context amounts to the claim that the music is non-structured (Fink 2011; see Table 2.1, Quotation 15). Fink proposes to analyze a “syntax” or structure that has a telos. The telos of this syntax is understood as being in “tension” with “presence,” or in other words a tension between “goals and grooves.” And for Fink, the purpose behind recuperating the telos of groove-based music is to resist “ceding” “musical structure” to “high art.” By demonstrating its structural telos, Fink bestows value on groove-based music— structure empowers.

54  Part I Table 2.1  Quotations: Music. Quote  1

 2

 3

 4

Claude Palisca, “Theory and Theorists,” Grove Music Online—Palisca and Bent 2014 “Theory is now understood as principally the study of the structure of music. This can be divided into melody, rhythm, counterpoint, harmony and form, but these elements are difficult to distinguish from each other and to separate from their contexts. At a more fundamental level theory includes considerations of tonal systems, scales, tuning, intervals, consonance, dissonance, durational proportions and the acoustics of pitch systems. A body of theory exists also about other aspects of music, such as composition, performance, orchestration, ornamentation, improvisation and electronic sound production. … Etymologically, then, theory is an act of contemplation. It is observing and speculating upon as opposed to doing something.” Ian Bent, “Analysis,” Grove Music Online—Bent and Pople 2014 a) Analysis entails “the interpretation of structures in music, together with their resolution into relatively simpler constituent elements, and the investigation of the relevant functions of those elements.” b) Structure “may stand for part of a work, a work in its entirety, a group or even a repertory of works, in a written or oral tradition.” The analyst “focuses … on a musical structure (whether a chord, a phrase, a work, the output of a composer or court etc.) and seeks to define its constituent elements and explain how they operate.” c) “The primary impulse of analysis is an empirical one: to get to grips with something on its own terms rather than in terms of other things. … Its central activity is comparison. By comparison it determines the structural elements and discovers the functions of those elements. … The central analytical act is thus the test for identity. And out of this arises the measurement of amount of difference, or degree of similarity. These two operations serve together to illuminate the three fundamental form-building processes: recurrence, contrast and variation.” d) “Underlying all aspects of analysis as an activity is the fundamental point of contact between mind and musical sound, namely musical perception.” Theodore Adorno, “On the Problem of Music Analysis” (1969)— Adorno 1982 “Analysis is thus concerned with structure, with structural problems, and finally, with structural listening. By structure I do not mean here the mere grouping of musical parts according to traditional formal schemata, however; I understand it rather as having to do with what is going on, musically, underneath these formal schemata.” (173) Pierre Boulez, “Series” (1961)—Boulez 1968 “With Webern … the series suddenly took on the aspect of a function of intervals giving its basic structure to the piece itself. … Today, serial thinking tends to emphasize that the series should not merely give birth to the vocabulary itself but should also extend the structure of the work, that is a total reaction against classical thought, which felt form as being, practically, a preexisting thing, as was the general morphology.” (302–303)

What Is Musical Structure Anyway?  55 Quote  5

 6

 7

 8

 9

10

Allen Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music (1973)—Forte 1973 “to provide a general theoretical framework, with reference to which the processes underlying atonal music may be systematically described. It is not claimed that all aspects of atonal music are dealt with (an improbable undertaking, in any event); instead, major emphasis has been placed upon fundamental components of structure. For instance, one can deal with pitch and disregard orchestration, but the reverse is not, in general, possible.” (Preface) Christopher Hasty, Meter as Rhythm (1997)—Hasty 1997 “rhythm seems to contain incompatible or even contradictory meanings that can exacerbate the problematic opposition of structure and process.” (4) “Conceived as process, rhythm confronts us with the intellectual difficulties of reconciling from a genuinely temporal perspective notions of whole and part, unity and multiplicity, continuity and discontinuity.” (67) Edward Cone, “Beyond Analysis” (1967)—Cone 1967 “We have arrived here at an important point. Expressive values in any art—if they exist at all—depend on concrete values. They cannot arise from analytical values alone … [E]xpression, by its very definition, implies a relationship between the work of art and something else; while analytical values are derivable purely from internal structure. This is in no way meant to suggest that structure has nothing to do with expression. Just as communication in a verbal language depends on both semantics and syntax, so artistic expression must involve both concrete and analytical values. Without the former, the structure could convey no message; without the latter, the message would be limited to the equivalent of primitive substantives and exclamations.” (46) Leo Treitler, “‘To Worship That Celestial Sound’: Motives for Analysis” (1982)—Treitler 1982 “As music historians we want analytical methodologies that are less normative and more phenomenological and historical; that take account of much more than pitch structures; and that concern themselves not with structures alone, but with the relations of structure and meaning.” (161) Allen Forte, “Schenker’s Conception of Musical Structure” (1959)— Forte 1959 “Just as Freud opened the way for a deeper understanding of the human personality with his discovery that the diverse patterns of overt behavior are controlled by certain underlying factors, so Schenker opened the way for a deeper understanding of musical structure with his discovery that the manifold of surface events in a given composition is related in specific ways to a fundamental organization.” (4) Felix Salzer, Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music (1952)— Salzer 1962 “these ideas [the theories of the preceding two parts] make conscious the intuitive perceptions of the musical mind and ear. In fact, structural hearing develops the innate, although unconscious tendency of many musical people to follow the music’s motion and direction. The task of clarifying and strengthening this propensity of musical (Continued)

56  Part I Quote

11

12

13

14

instinct and imagination makes it necessary to systematize the processes of structural hearing in order to gain a workable and practical approach.” (257) Dora Hanninen, A Theory of Music Analysis (2012)—Hanninen 2012 “[The theory] defines three domains of musical experience and discourse about: the sonic (psychoacoustic), contextual (or associative, sparked by varying degrees of representation), and structural (guided by a specific theory of musical structure or syntax).” (4) “A sonic criterion (S) is a rationale for segmentation that responds to disjunctions in the attribute-values of individual sounds and silences within a single psychoacoustic musical dimension.” (23) “A contextual criterion (C) is a rationale for segmentation based on repetition, equivalence, or similarity between two (or more) groupings of notes within a specific musical context.” (32) “A structural criterion (T) is a rationale for segmentation that indicates an interpretation supported by a specific orienting theory. Like contextual criteria, structural criteria partake of basic concepts in music theory that are often used nominally and as if observation language … [S]tructural criteria can recommend segments for analytic consideration, they cannot actually produce convincing musical segments unless they are realized—that is, unless the instantiation of the structural criterion coincides with the instantiation of a sonic or contextual criterion.” (43) Christopher Hasty, “Segmentation and Process in Post-Tonal Music” (1981)—Hasty 1981 “This article presents a brief outline of a theory of segmentation and an analytic method … [The analyses] offer a broad view of the possibilities of structural formation. “It is this property of being simultaneously differentiated and undifferentiated [in some domain] which creates structure.” (58) “a structure has two aspects. First, it must have a unitary value in some domain, that is, there must be no change of value in this domain which would cause it to be broken up into subcomponents. Second, it must be distinguished as an object of our attention by possessing a difference of value in the same domain compared with another object. … On the basis of this concept of structure a refinement may be introduced in the concept of segmentation. Segmentation is the process of structural formation, the action of structures producing formal articulations.” (58–59) Robert Morgan, “The Concept of Unity and Music Analysis” (2003)— Morgan 2003 “the unity asserted by music analysts acknowledges the coexistence of distinct and contrasting elements, but finds that, however differentiated these may be, they work together to produce a common and coherent goal.” (21–22) “Analysis is based on the assumption that music ‘makes sense’, without which it makes no sense itself as a discipline.” (27) Cornelia Fales, “The Paradox of Timbre” (2002)—Fales 2002 “Merriam’s recordings of the music [Whispered Inanga] betray the subtle bias of what has come to be called ‘pitch-centrism’ or ‘timbre deafness,’ a perceptual proclivity on the part of Western listeners, (Continued)

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15

including ethnomusicologists, to focus on melody in music where the dominant parameter is timbre.” (56) “In the last fifteen years, the citing of timbre as an important feature of African music has taken on the same aura of banal truth that once characterized the association of rhythm and African music. … As scholars, indeed as listeners, we have a difficult time describing timbre. Though we can talk about it in large generalities, as though it were a conceptual abstraction. … it is only by deliberate effort that we conceptualize it as a distinctly ongoing, dynamic feature of music with the same clarity as pitch or meter.” (57) Robert Fink, “Goal-directed Soul? Analyzing Rhythmic Teleology in African American Popular Music” (2011)—Fink 2011 “In this analytical essay, I hope to show that rhythmic structure in groove-based popular music can indeed be syntactic, and that hermeneutic analysis of rhythm might productively begin not by parsing musical repertories as life-affirming or body-denying according to their degree of goal direction, but by exploring the pervasive, multiparametric tension between telos and presence, between goals and grooves.” (187) “But there is a hermeneutic price to pay for the ideological flight from syntax. Insulated thereby from a particular kind of essentializing value judgment, one must concede the entire domain of musical structure to the defenders of high art, and reify a problematic distinction by agreeing with them that the rhythmic matrix of a piece of popular music should best be approached as a deterritorialized zone, in which the controlling forces of structure and signification no longer hold.” (191)

II. Structure and its Historical moment Section I sketches out the breadth of ways that the term structure is and has been used in writings about music since the 1950s. The historical restriction links to my larger goal of historicizing the practices of music analysis/theory, and of demonstrating the senses in which structure serves as an “epistemic metaphor” for these practices in the mid-twentieth century. The second section continues this task of historicization. Here I consider the debates within Structuralism, a prominent intellectual movement of the mid-twentieth century, about the concept of structure that was central to the movement. This brief sampling of ideas provides another dimension to my previous historical framing of a “modern” analytical practice by early-to-mid-twentieth century Analytic philosophy. Both Structuralism and Analytic philosophy may be traced to the more-encompassing embrace of scientific models of thought and method in the twentieth century, models that fostered Structuralism’s focus on “structure.” Structuralism has been the subject of recent historical scholarship, particularly by François Dosse (1997) and Jonathan Culler (2006), and interested readers can gain a broad understanding of the movement from these studies.

58  Part I I focus here on the ideas of selected authors in the structuralist debates— Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricoeur—since their work both articulated the role of structure as a guiding concept and the critique of the concept. The debates about structure in the 1960s provide particular assistance to my project of historicizing the ways that concepts of structure are used in music scholarship since the midtwentieth century and they prove suggestive for ways to develop broader and more inclusive concepts of structure. To begin, a passage from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked gives an outline of the goals of his structuralist approach to anthropology. The defining figure of mid-century Structuralism, Lévi-Strauss articulates the book’s objective in its “Overture”: analysis of “native myths of the New World” brings “order out of chaos” and “disclose[s] structure”12 (Lévi-Strauss, 1975; see Table 2.2, Quotation 3). The anthropologist makes explicit the order that, while implicit, emerges from structuralist methods of analysis. From the observation of diverse myths, a system of ordered relations arises, and that ordering explains the diversity of myths with higher level concepts. In other words, for Lévi-Strauss structure explains difference. In his 1963 “The Structuralist Activity,” the literary critic Roland Barthes reflects on the nature of structuralist methods, defining the method broadly as establishing the “conditions of thought”13 (Dosse 1997, v.1: 208; Barthes 2006; see Table 2.2, Quotation 4). For Barthes, Structuralism is an activity that does not discover but rather “reconstruct[s] … an ‘object.’” Through the process of “dissection” the structuralist “articulates” in order to “make something appear”—to make it “intelligible.” Structure in this formulation is not “in” the object but rather a “simulacrum of the object.” As simulacrum, structure does not refer to the reality of objects of the world but rather it is a “mimesis based not on analogy but on function”14 (Dosse 1997, v.1:207). Important for my project here then is Barthes observation that the process of articulation produces structure and hence intelligibility and that structure is a simulacrum (Dosse’s mimesis) of function.15 In his 1966 book The Order of Things, the philosopher Michel Foucault “analyses … the experience of order and … its modes of being” with the broad goal “to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible” or more generally how order and knowledge are co-constitutive (Foucault, 1994; see Table 2.2, Quotation 5a). An early work reflecting Foucault’s engagement with Structuralist ideas and methods, The Order of Things is a historicizing study of human discourse across three historical eras—from the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and Modernity. Foucault’s historicization of knowledge necessarily turns on questions of order and structure as epistemological concepts. In other words, order and structure are discursive formulations that produce knowledge. Here I turn to two passages on order and structure that provide some insightful and useful distinctions. In a section titled “Order” Foucault differentiates order from measurement, while noting that both involve comparison of some sort (Foucault 1994; Table 2.2, Quotation 5b).

What Is Musical Structure Anyway?  59 While measurement in Foucault’s formulation entails quantitative comparisons, order establishes elements in a qualitative comparison, organizing them by degree of difference. In a later chapter focused on a concept of “structure” in a biological context, Foucault makes clear that structure is a reflexive epistemological concept (Foucault 1994; see Table 2.2, Quotation 5c). Structure assumes a discursive power since it “enables” the “visible” to enter into discourse as meaningful. In other words, that which is “visible”—or in more general terms that which is “intelligible,” that which “makes sense”—results from an epistemological engagement that is both “perceptual” (Foucault’s ‘pre-linguistic’) and linguistic. Of significance, then, are Foucault’s distinctions between qualitative and quantitative forms of comparison and their link to difference and identity, and his observation of the multiplicity of the “visible” that through its limiting and filtering affords discursive power. The philosopher Jacques Derrida attended a 1966 conference in the United States, presenting “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” which at once articulated a critique of Structuralism and its concept of structure and affirmed Derrida’s “position as a structuralist seeking to go beyond the paradigm”16 (Dosse 1997, 32). Amongst the many strands of his argument in the article, Derrida targets the concept of structure as a central premise of structuralism (Derrida 1972; see Table 2.2, Quotation 6). For Derrida, attempts to give structure an “origin,” a point of “presence,” end up both “organizing” the structure and neutralizing it as concept and function. This center that reduces structure also suppresses the “play” of structure, a play that arises only once one recognizes that structure itself is part of the discursive framework of understanding.17 The understanding that structure has no origin leads inexorably to the notion of structure as a discursive function for which the “transcendental signified is never absolutely present outside a system of difference.” For Derrida, structure exists not “in” things or the relations between them but rather, as a function of discursive understanding. When not limited by an origin or a point of presence, structure functions as an open complex of relations existing in the play of differences. Another issue of debate and critique arising around structuralism concerns historical change and temporality in general, the debates centering on distinctions and intersections between synchronic vs. diachronic modes of understanding. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur came to this issue in the later 1960s, bringing a hermeneutical perspective to the topic.18 In his 1968 “Structure, Sign, Event,” an article focused on linguistic meaning, Ricoeur addresses the concept of polysemy and how a multiplicity of meanings arises in discourse. (Ricoeur 1973; see Table 2.2, Quotation 7) For Ricoeur, the phenomenon of linguistic polysemy occurs as a result of a “cumulative process” by which words acquire new meanings while retaining the previous ones. Such polysemy occurs as a dialectic between “structure and event.” In this frame, structure serves as a kind of non-static background in which meaning arises in an ongoing generative and temporal process.19

60  Part I Table 2.2  Quotations: Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy. Quote 1

2

3

4

5

A Dictionary of Sociology (2012)—Scott and Marshall, eds. —“Structure” 2012 “Structure: A term referring to any recurring pattern of social behaviour; or, more specifically, to the ordered interrelationships between the different elements of a social system or society. … It is sometimes used rather loosely to refer to any observable ‘pattern’ in social activities …” William Sewell, “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation”—Sewell 1992 “The term structure empowers what it designates. Structure, in its nominative sense, always implies structure in its transitive verbal sense. Whatever aspect of social life we designate as structure is posited as “structuring” some other aspect of social existence—whether it is class that structures politics, gender that structures employment opportunities, rhetorical conventions that structure texts or utterances, or modes of production that structure social formations. Structure operates in social scientific discourse as a powerful metonymic device, identifying some part of a complex social reality as explaining the whole. It is a word to conjure within the social sciences. In fact, structure is less a precise concept than a kind of founding or epistemic metaphor of social scientific-and scientific-discourse.” (1–2) Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (1964)—Lévi-Strauss 1974 Analysis of “native mythologies of the New World” entails a “consideration of certain guiding patterns.” And as a result of this analytical process, “loose thread join up with one another, gaps are closed, connections are established, and something resembling order is to be seen emerging from chaos. … Thus is brought into being a multi-dimensional body, whose central parts disclose a structure …” (Overture, 1–3) Roland Barthes, “The Structuralist Activity” (1963)—Barthes 2006 “structuralism is … an activity … the goal [of which] is to reconstruct an ‘object’ in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of function (the ‘functions’) of this object. Structure is therefore actually a simulacrum of the object, but a directed, interested simulacrum, since the imitated object makes something appear which remained invisible or, if one prefers, unintelligible.” (26) “The structuralist activity involves two typical operations: dissection and articulation.” (27) Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966)—Foucault 1994 a) “Thus, in every culture, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and of its modes of being. The present study is an attempt to analyse that experience. … Quite obviously, such an analysis does not belong to the history of ideas or of science: it is rather an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards.” (Preface xxi–xxii) (Continued)

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7

b) “There exist two forms of comparison, and only two: the comparison of measurement and that of order. … [Measurement] analyzes into units in order to establish relations of equality and inequality; [order] establishes elements, the simplest that can be found, and arranges differences according to the smallest possible degrees.” (Chapter 3, Representing, II. Order, 53) c) “By limiting and filtering the visible, structure enables it to be transcribed into language. It permits the visibility of the animal or plant to pass over in its entirety into the discourse that receives it. Structure is that designation of the visible which, by means of a kind of pre-linguistic sifting, enables it to be transcribed into language.” (Chapter 5, Classifying, III. Structure, p.135, IV. Character, 138) Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966)—Derrida 1972 “… structure … has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure—one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. (247–48) “… in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse—provided we can agree on this word—that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.” (249) Paul Ricoeur, “Structure, Sign, Event” (1968)—Ricoeur 1973 “… the word is a cumulative entity, capable of acquiring new dimensions of meaning without losing the old ones. It is this cumulative metaphorical process which is projected over the surface of the system as polysemy. … Now what I here call projection … is the most interesting because we there come marvelously upon what I have called the exchanges between structure and event.” (93)

III. Towards a critique of musical structure The debates over Structuralism in the 1960s provide an opening into a critique of the concept of musical structure. My discussion above targets the concept of structure in these debates in order to address issues central to a consideration of music. This third section revisits the writings about musical structure in the first section through the critique of structure in the second section.

Revisiting Ontology 1—What is Structure? For Barthes, structure is a simulacrum, the result of a reconstruction of an object that serves its intelligibility. Adorno’s sense that musical structure resides in the “problem” of a work resembles Barthes’ notion that structure is a “simulacrum.” For Adorno, the process of analytical engagement of a

62  Part I musical work articulates the structure—reconstructs the work as problem— and hence reveals its intelligibility. Somewhat differently, Boulez conceives structure as a higher-level concept emerging from the features of phenomena (in this instance, the series). This sense of structure as an emergent property also runs through Hasty’s discussion of segmentation and the process of “structural formation” (Hasty 1981). Both Derrida and Foucault situate structure as part of a broader system of discursive understanding, demonstrating the reflexivity of structure and knowledge. None of the authors quoted in Section I explicitly thematize the idea that structure is part of a discursive framework of musical knowledge, but it is an implicit topic for several. For instance, despite his polemical position, Morgan acknowledges that the concept of musical unity is an “analytical construction,” and certainly the spirited debate following Morgan’s article takes up questions of the discursive function of a concept of musical unity.20 And Fales’s critique of Western “timbre deafness” and its associated conceptual problems is motivated by broader issues of the nature of musical understanding.

Revisiting Ontology 2—Oppositions The Structuralist method as employed in particular by Lévi-Strauss was premised on the observation of binary oppositions, such as raw/cooked, clean/dirty, moist/dry, etc.; from these oppositions the researcher discloses the structure of human behavior. Within music studies there is a tendency to put musical structure in opposition to something else, more along the lines of Ricoeur’s opposition of structure and event. For instance, Hasty’s opposition of structure and process, like Ricoeur’s, poses the static against the dynamic. Cone’s and Treitler’s oppositions—structure/expression and structure/meaning—pose the objective against the subjective and suggest the rational vs. the irrational. In these particular instances, musical sounds have structure that can be distinguished from the ways those sounds have human significance. And in yet another instance, Forte’s opposition of pitch to timbre as primary and secondary features of music poses the structural against the non-structural, disqualifying timbre as a topic of music theoretical research.

Revisiting Ontology 3—Origins In his critique of Structuralism, Derrida argues that structure operates within a discursive system of knowledge and that attempts to give structure a center—an origin—“neutralizes” its conceptual “play.” Of the quotes considered here, two explicitly identify an origin for musical structure. Forte (1959) invokes the Freudian unconscious, claiming that Schenker’s concept of musical structure is premised on an “underlying” and hence absent “fundamental organization.” This absent origin, which is revealed through

What Is Musical Structure Anyway?  63 analysis, “orients, balances and organizes” and hence “limits” what Derrida would call the “play of structure.” Salzer, on the other hand, takes a cognitive tack, claiming that the Schenkerian theories presented in his text clarify “the intuitive perceptions of the music mind and ear.” Musical structure in this instance refers to an innate human capacity that amounts to a transcendental logic, a logic that is affirmed in analytical observations of unity and coherence.

Revisiting: Epistemology A quick survey of the methodological terms used in both structuralist and musical discourse reveals strong similarities—researchers dissect and articulate (Barthes), determine segments or constitutive elements (Bent, Hanninen, and Hasty), interpret structures (Bent), disclose structure (Lévi-Strauss), compare for identity and difference in either quantitative or qualitative terms (Bent and Foucault), and determine functions (Bent and Barthes). The epistemological frame for both Structuralism and music suggests a kind of empiricism: the researcher parses a whole into parts and comparison of the parts enables an interpretation/disclosure of organizational forces.21

Revisiting: Discursive Effects of Structure Both Derrida and Foucault conceive structure as a concept thoroughly enmeshed in discourse—in human understanding itself—and hence as wielding power in Sewell’s sense. This power is clearly present in Fink’s wish to observe structure for groove-based African-American popular music and in Fales’s wish to reclaim timbre from Western timbre-deafness. If structure is an “epistemic metaphor” for thought about music, then critique of how the concept of structure is employed is not only warranted but essential to music analytical practice. Both Foucault and Derrida remark on the limiting and neutralizing functions of structure but also on the possibilities of “play” or rearrangement as a feature of the processes of understanding. And Derrida in particular entertains the possibility of structurings that proliferate. In this sense of possibility, Derrida’s idea of the “play of structure” is in accord with Boulez’s notion of extending structure and with Adorno’s notion that structure transcends formal schemata. Concluding Comments Section III points toward a critique of the concept of musical structure without providing a comprehensive one. The section serves more as a kind of free association of ideas in order to open the door to ways of thinking about musical structure that is inclusive and broad—in particular, open the door to a dynamic notion of musical structuring. From Barthes’ notion of structure

64  Part I as a reconstruction that builds intelligibility, from Foucault’s meditations on types of ordering and their discursive functions, from Derrida’s observations on the limiting function of absent origins and the play of structure, and from Ricoeur’s notion of polysemy as a dialectic between structure and event—from these critical reflections structure may be reconceived in ways that generate productive engagements with classical music of the present.

notes 1. I return to Sewell’s ideas below. 2. While encyclopedia articles can certainly be subject to the same kind of critique as any other scholarly writing, they do indicate something about accepted beliefs at the center of thought about music. 3. In the remainder of this chapter I will refer to the authors of the “Theory” and “Analysis” entries as simply Palisca and Bent since each was the primary author. 4. In the quotation from the Dictionary of Sociology at the beginning of this chapter, the observation that “structure is one of the most important yet elusive concepts” comes from Sewell 1992. 5. Most notably this echo may be observed in the work of Lerdahl and Jackendoff. See for instance Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983 and Lerhdal 1992. 6. Ian Bent is a coauthor for the sections of the article focusing on practices from the nineteenth century to the present. 7. Ian Cross observes that the notions of hearing in analytical contexts differ from that in psychological studies of music. In the analytical context, hearing is “conscious and volitional” and hence malleable, while in the psychological context it is “more or less involuntary … involv[ing] non-conscious processes” (Cross 1998:3–4). 8. Hanninen restricts the “structural” domains in her example analyses to Schenkerian and twelve-tone theory, although the theory does not prescribe that restriction. She in fact allows for the possibility of analysis of a work that does not have an appropriate theoretical apparatus, hence necessitating the idea of a neutral observation language (Hanninen 2012: 7–8). 9. The entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a good overview of the issues in the philosophy of science—see Bogen 2013. And important articles on the issue in music studies include: Rahn 1979 and DeBellis 1995. 10. Morgan is not the first to draw attention to these assumptions, and indeed this critique occurs in Kerman 1980, Solie 1980–1, and Treitler 1982, among others. See Chapter 1 for bibliographic citations. 11. Morgan generated several responses from the authors—Chua, Dubiel, Korsyn, and J. Kramer—who were the subjects of his critical focus in the 2003 article— see Music Analysis 2004 vol. 23/2–3. The exchanges provide an excellent review of the issues of music analysis with respect to questions of unity. 12. The Raw and the Cooked is famously organized using musical terms: overture, sonata, invention, toccata, etc. The book is the first volume of a larger study of Amerindian myths. 13. Barthes eventually renounced this early orientation to Structuralist methods and goals, adopting a post-structural perspective focused on the “nature and authority of the text” (Risser 1998).

What Is Musical Structure Anyway?  65 14. Barthes use of the term “simulacrum” here differs from the later use of the term by his younger colleague Jean Baudrillard. Barthes use of the term recalls its meaning in Ancient philosophy. 15. Barthes’s work is not typically associated with Lévi-Strauss’s brand of Structuralism, but as Dosse points out, Barthes was a “mythic figure for structuralism:” he was a “subtle and supple incarnation of it wrought of moods rather than of rigor” (Dosse, v. 1: 71). 16. Dosse maintains that it was Derrida’s critique of Structuralism at this conference that led to the U.S. designation of “post-structuralism” (See Dosse, v. 2: 32–33). Derrida’s article was published in English in the 1972 proceedings of the conference: Macksey and Donato 1970. It also appears in French in Derrida’s 1967 L’écriture et la différence. 17. In the Structuralist Controversy, Richard Macksey, the translator of Derrida’s article translated “jeu” as “free play.” The translator of Derrida’s article in Writing and Difference, Alan Bass, translates it simply as “play.” I follow Bass’s translation here. 18. The issue of diachrony was central to another strand of Derrida’s critique of Lévi-Strauss’s work, and, as Dosse points out, the wish to “make structures more dynamic and more historical … was the sense of the notion of différance that [Derrida] introduced …” (Dosse, v. 2: 33). 19. Elsewhere in the article, Ricoeur relates his formulation of the dynamic polysemy of the word to Chomsky’s generative grammar. He describes Chomsky’s grammar as a “dynamic rule of generation” that takes account of the “antinomy” of structure and event and he contrast that with his own approach that addresses the antinomy in the “semantic order” (Ricoeur 1973 [1968]: 91). 20. As pointed out earlier, the several prior critiques of music analytical/theoretical practice raise issues pertinent to the broader issue of the reflexivity of structure and musical knowledge. 21. Hanninen’s theory of analysis is more complex than this formulation, but it still has an empirical basis: structure is defined by existing theories and employed in conjunction with other domains (sonic and contextual) to produce interpretations. The determination of segments arises from an empirical engagement within each of these three domains, and the process of determining the segments leads to interpretation. See Boerner et al. 2014 for a full critique of Hanninen’s theory.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. 1982. “On the Problem of Music Analysis.” Translated by Max Paddison. Music Analysis 1: 169–187. Barthes, Roland. 2006 [1963]. “The Structuralist Activity.” Structuralism. Edited by J. Culler, vol. I: 25–30. New York: Routledge. Bent, Ian D., and Anthony Pople. 2014. “Analysis.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed 25 October 2014. http://www. oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/41862. Boerner, Michael, Matt Brounley, Felipe Ledesma-Núñez, Judy Lochhead, Anna Reguero, Hayley Roud, and Laura Smith. 2014. “Review Essay: A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization by Dora Hanninen,” Musicology Australia 36/1:130–147.

66  Part I Bogen, Jim. 2013.“Theory and Observation in Science.” In The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed 15 November 2014. http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/science-theory-observation. Boulez, Pierre. 1968[1961]. “The Series,” Notes of an Apprenticeship, Translated by Herbert Weinstock. New York: A A. Knopf. Cone, Edward T. 1967. “Beyond Analysis.” Perspectives of New Music 6: 33–51. Cross, Ian. 1998. “Music Analysis and Music Perception.” Music Analysis 17: 3–20. Culler, Jonathan. 2006. Structuralism. 4 volumes. New York: Routledge. DeBellis, Mark. 1995. Music and Conceptualization. New York: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1972 [1966]. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In The Structuralist Controversy. Edited by R. Macksey and E. Donato, 247–272. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Dosse, Francois. 1997 [1991]. History of Structuralism. 2 volumes. Translated by Deborah Glassman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fales, Cornelia. 2002. “The Paradox of Timbre.” Ethnomusicology 46: 179–238. Fink, Robert. 2011. “Goal-Directed Soul? Analyzing Rhythmic Teleology in African American Popular Music.” Jounal of the American Musicological Society 64: 179–238. Forte, Allen. 1959. “Schenker’s Conception of Musical Structure.” Journal of Music Theory 3: 1–30. ———. 1973. The Structure of Atonal Music. New Haven: Yale University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1994 [1966]. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books. Hanninen, Dora. 2012. A Theory of Musical Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Hasty, Christopher. 1981. “Segmentation and Process in Post-Tonal Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 3: 55–73. ———. 1997. Meter as Rhythm. New York: Oxford University Press. Lerdahl, Fred. 1992. “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems.” Contemporary Music Review 6: 97–121. Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray Jackendoff. 1983. Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lévi-Straus, Claude. 1975 [1964]. The Raw and the Cooked. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row. Macksey, Richard, ed. 1970. The Structuralist Controversy: The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Morgan, Robert. 2003. “The Concept of Unity and Music Analysis.” Music Analysis 22: 7–50. Palisca, Claude V., and Ian D. Bent. 2014. “Theory, theorists.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed 15 November 2014. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/44944. Rahn, John. 1979. “Aspects of Musical Explanation.” Perspectives of New Music 17: 204–224. Ricoeur, Paul. 1973 [1968]. “Structure, Sign, Event.” The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Edited by Don Ihde, 79–96. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Risser, James C. 1998. “Roland Barthes,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig, 656–58. London: Routledge.

What Is Musical Structure Anyway?  67 Salzer, Felix. 1962 [1952]. Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music. New York: Dover Publications. Sewell, William H., Jr. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1–29. “Structure.” 2012. A Dictionary of Sociology. John Scott and Gordon Marshall, editors. Oxford University Press 2009. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed 22 June 2012. http://www.oxfordreference.com.libproxy.cc.stonybrook.edu/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t88.e2279. Treitler, Leo. 1982. “‘To Worship That Celestial Sound’: Motives for Analysis.” The Journal of Musicology 1: 153–70. Zbikowski, Lawrence. 2002. Conceptualizing Music. Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

3 Music Analysis–Producing Knowledge

Music analysis produces knowledge. This statement, my claim about the goals of analytical inquiry, differs from but does not contradict how others define the aspirations of music analysis. For instance, Ian Bent writes that analysis explains how a piece “works” (Bent 2014); David Lewin that analysis serves as a “goad … to musical action …” (Lewin 1986, 377); Stephen Blum that analysis “enables us to recognize and alter our habitual responses” (Blum 1992, 50);1 Luciano Berio that analysis “confirms and celebrates an ongoing dialogue between the ear and mind” (Berio 2006, 130); and Kofi Agawu that analysis “sharpens the listener’s ear, enhances perception and … deepens appreciation” (Agawu 2004, 270). I embrace these five aspirations as contributing factors in the larger project of producing knowledge—specifically knowledge about music of the present. Such a productive analysis encompasses these aspirations: 1) it focuses on particular musical works, interrogating them as sound and taking account of the various ways they make musical sense; 2) it generates new forms of musical behavior—be it listening, performing, or creating; 3) it queries the conceptual, cultural, and historical factors that shape our engagements with musical works; 4) it explores the reflexivity between sensation and concept; and 5) it amplifies our experiential engagements with musical works and with music generally. Analytical inquiry as I define it here entails holistic investigation of a musical work (or possibly works) from these multiple aspirational perspectives with the goal of producing knowledge—knowledge about musical works and the nature of music experience. While the kind of “productive” musical analysis I define here builds upon existing ideas and approaches to analytical investigation, it also seeks to do more. I propose to renovate analytical investigation, making it habitable for recent music. This renovation entails the inclusion of a critical component that is not a typical part of analysis. Such a critical component, defined fully in the next chapter, obliges the analyst to examine both the analytical/ theoretical concepts and methods and the experiential contexts that are the orienting background for the investigative process. The overarching goal of analytical inquiry then is producing knowledge, an ongoing process that recognizes our own historical, social, and cultural embeddedness. Such a renovation of analytical inquiry not only serves my project of engaging recently

Music Analysis–Producing Knowledge  69 created music but also contributes to the processes of renewal within the Western classical music tradition. The critiques of Chapters 1 and 2 suggest that analysis and its corresponding concept of structure as articulated in music scholarship since the mid-twentieth century are shaped by historical and cultural exigencies of the time and in particular by a high modern aesthetic and its orienting intellectual context. These critiques establish the circumstances that motivate a renovation of analytical inquiry. This chapter begins the process of renovation by developing the idea of music analysis as producing knowledge. It lays out the philosophical background against which a productive analytical inquiry is developed, addressing epistemological and methodological issues. The chapter is organized around four topic areas: 1 2 3 4

Musical works and listening Sound-thinking: musical things and the structuring of musical time The analyst: investigating and speculating Producing knowledge—affecting new musical behaviors

Discussion of these topics does not define particular musical concepts of structuring nor define a methodology. Rather it sets out the fundamental positions about music analysis that provide a basis for developing a productive analytical inquiry appropriate for the twenty-first century and its music. The first section is the longest, laying out a concept of musical work and the role that listening plays in its conception. This section proposes a renovation of a concept of work that recognizes musical practices of creators, performers, and listeners in the twenty-first century. The remaining three sections introduce ideas about music and analysis that flow from this concept of musical work. Chapter 4 returns to the ideas in these three sections in the context of a detailed account of productive analysis. 1.  Musical works and listening Music analysis focuses on music—a seemingly simple project but one rife with epistemological and methodological landmines. Analytical investigation tends to address musical works, or parts of them, as identifiable pieces of music. It can also be used to make comparisons across pieces, as Bent rightly points out in his Grove Music Online article, but such comparisons depend on identifiable and named works. The status of works as abstract or idealized entities has received considerable attention in the philosophical and musicological literature, and it is not necessary to rehearse that discussion here.2 I take an operational approach to the term, understanding work as something identifiable and linked to a creator—for instance, Saariaho’s Lonh. This operational approach is motivated by issues stemming from the

70  Part I role of sounding performances in the twenty-first century and the role of the score in delimiting a work’s sounds. The operational approach compels a realignment of the concept of work to a dynamic model of sound structuring that directly affects the nature of analytical inquiry. Performances of music occur and are available to the analyst in myriad forms in the twenty-first century: live performance, audio recordings, audiovisual recordings, as well as imaginative performances of the analyst’s “ear.” This easy availability of performances makes explicit the problems of approaching musical works in abstract terms and demands that these instantiations of the work be figured into analytical investigations.3 The differences between performances delineate the work as a set of possibilities, not as an idealized and fixed “structure.” The work, as a named musical occurrence, has its own processes of becoming through such existing and possible performances, and the analyst encounters and engages the work over some span of these processes of becoming. A productive analytical investigation of a work, then, should take explicit account of its performances, building their differences into analytical investigations of the work. The analysis then focuses not on some essence of the work that transcends it performances, but rather analytical formulations are conceived through these differences.4 Works are often linked to a notated score, a tangible document that provides performance guidelines, and analytical investigation has often focused on these scores as an “objective” indication of the work and its structure. A full consideration of a score’s status as an “objective” sign of a work is well beyond the scope of my project here, but the notion that the score can serve to define the work is called into question in the case of most recent music.5 The most obvious challenge arises with pieces that have no score—especially electro-acoustic works. But even in those instances in which pieces do have scores, the notation does not necessarily have a simple or direct referent to a particular musical sound. Next I sample some of these notations in order to demonstrate that analysis must seek evidence beyond that of the score; then I turn to the situation of works with no score, which pose a somewhat different kind of challenge. Scores of recent music may incorporate indeterminacy of various sorts, from the game pieces of John Zorn to the temporal and pitch freedoms of Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet.6 In all cases of indeterminacy, specific performance decisions are made by the performers in the context of rehearsals and/or performances. The scores of Zorn’s game pieces consist of verbal instructions and other typographical symbols, and the Gubaidulina quartet includes a combination of typical notational symbols that have been altered and verbal instructions. The indeterminacy of these and other such scores affords a degree of openness to the work necessitating an analytical reliance on performance. Certain types of notational symbols in scores provide instruction to performers but do not have a simple or straightforward sounding referent.

Music Analysis–Producing Knowledge  71 For instance, these would include the case of multiphonics for woodwinds, extended techniques, and timbre. Multiphonics are notoriously unstable for woodwinds and their production varies significantly from player to player. So, while a composer may choose to notate a multiphonic with either precise or suggested pitches, the results will vary from performance to performance. Extended techniques present a more intense version of this issue. In works with such techniques, a score typically includes verbal descriptions of how to perform a certain technique and then that technique is indicated in the score by a special symbol. These techniques involve some innovative use of the instrument or voice that has greater variability in performance interpretation. For instance, Example 3.1 shows the instructions and first system of the score of Hans Thomalla’s Albumblatt (Thomalla 2010). The instructions, shown in Example 3.1a indicate matters of tuning and types of sound, and a quick look at the score excerpt in Example 3.1b shows a range of other techniques affecting the attack and release points of sounds, tuning, harmony, various other articulation effects of the bow, and so on. The realizations of these notations vary significantly from performer to performer, from performance to performance; and while there is always interpretive freedom assumed in musical performance, the distinctions indicated by Thomalla both depend on the particularities of performance realization and are significant features of Albumblatt’s music-expressive design. The sounding results of performances, which are not fully specified as such by the score, are integral to the work and to a productive analysis. The notation of timbre and the role that the timbral domain plays in much recent music raises issues similar to those with extended techniques. The conceptual issues of timbre are notorious and have been addressed by various scholars over the last several decades. Fales (2002) gives an excellent summary of the biases and conceptual problems associated with timbre, from the observation of “pitch-centrism” and “timbre deafness” to the role of “perceptualization” in determining the function of timbre in a musical context. Eleanor Hovda’s 1988 string quartet Lemniscates illustrates well how timbre can play a central role in recent music (Hovda 1988). Example 3.2 excerpts the first and third systems of the score, which correspond to first and third minutes of the work. In the score she writes that the music addresses itself to “excavating ‘sound around the sound’” and instructs the players to move their bows slowly and often in a “figure eight” in order to excavate the sound from their instruments. Players are given various freedoms and encouraged to coax “glints” and “airsounds” into the sonic realm. The score in this instance incorporates some indeterminacy and asks for various extended techniques in an effort to delineate a work that has sound quality—timbre—as its primary

a)

b)

Example 3.1 Hans Thomalla, Albumblatt, excerpt. a) Instruction page b) First system, mm. 1–5

Example 3.2  Eleanor Hovda, Lemniscates, First and Third systems.

74  Part I music-expressive feature. Productive analysis must direct itself to these sounding features and hence must incorporate performances. Electro-acoustic works raise a number of fascinating issues for analytical inquiry. Some works involve only electronic sounds, while others combine performed music with electronic sounds or other electronic transformations. For works with only electronic sounds, it is relatively standard nowadays to have no score since performers are not involved—although scores were sometimes produced in the 1960s for copyright purposes.7 Existing in some medium for sound encoding, the works are not performed by instrumentalists or vocalists but rather by the sound engineer and the playback equipment. This effect of equipment and engineers on musical sounding applies to all recorded music and I raise it here to point out that electro-acoustic works also have instantiations—that these works also have temporal becoming through their performances. Since electro-acoustic works typically do not have scores, analysts and other commentators have turned instead to two different ways of visualizing a work’s sounding. In one instance, spectral and amplitude representations provide a visual analogue. These are automatic and objective in the sense that they display acoustical information about a sound file and typically show time on the horizontal axis.8 In the second instance, some authors have invented ways to map visually the events of an electro-acoustic work, using subjective decision-making processes. The resulting representations are typically in a score-like format with graphic symbols replacing traditional notation. Wehinger’s “aural score” of Ligeti’s Artikulation was one of the first such visualizations9 (Wehinger 1970). Both of these models of representation—the objective and the s­ ubjective—may be put into the service of analytical inquiry.10 In the first case, analytical observations are read from the representation and in the latter case, analytical observations are made as part of the process of representation.11 Increasingly, composers create works combining instrumentalists and/or vocalists with electronics. The scores of these works vary significantly with respect to how the electronic part is indicated. For instance, Example 3.3 cites measures 39–43 of Anna Clyne’s Steelworks for flutes, bass clarinet, percussion—all amplified—and tape12 (Clyne 2006). The tape part includes samples taken from the sounds of a steelworks factory, the voices of two men who worked at the now-defunct factory in Brooklyn, New York, and samples of particular instrumental motives from Steelworks itself. As the example shows, the tape part has no cues in the score and none exist in the performance parts. Rather, the players have a click track to help coordinate with the tape. During the excerpt, the tape part includes samples of the motoric marimba motive, the sound of falling metal, a steam engine sound, and a buzzing electric sound. Given the lack of a written trace of the tape part in the score of Steelworks, the analyst must rely on aural engagements with the music of the tape part in conjunction with the live instruments in order to address the music of the work.

Example 3.3  Anna Clyne’s Steelworks, mm. 39–43.

76  Part I As the preceding discussion suggests, recent music challenges existing assumptions about musical works and the status of their structures—challenges that affect the practice of analysis. Both the easy availability of multiple performances and the relation of sounding music to a notated score (if one exists) compel a renovation of analytical investigation. If musical works are delineated by their performances and the analyst engages those performances through embodied aural experience, then the role of such experience needs explicit acknowledgment and articulation in analytical investigations.13 A turn toward embodied aural experience already has a strong presence in various recent strands of scholarship on listening and related issues of auditory experience.14 In his 1976 groundbreaking Listening and Voice, philosopher Don Ihde calls attention to visualist and reductionist tendencies in contemporary philosophical thought and to a forgetting of “sounds as meaningful” (Ihde 2007, 4). His “phenomenology of auditory experience” explores the wide range of ways that sounds have meanings in human experience, tracing the perceptual malleability not only of listening but further of sound as meaningful.15 Two of Ihde’s strategies have played a role in shaping my project here. In the first, Ihde approaches listening within a broader context of auditory experience, drawing out the ways that sounds and sounding become significant for humans as they engage the world.16 As specific events, sounds assume a broad spectrum of meanings: from hearing that it was a wooden bowl that just fell on the tile floor to an annoying high-pitched and tinny warble from a cell phone during a performance of Chaya Czernowyn’s Wintersongs V: Forgotten light, and from hearing the fire engine drive west on the street outside my window to hearing those first chords of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto as they melt away the tension in my back. Listening, as Ihde demonstrates, is an interpretive activity that shapes and is shaped by the broad array of cultural, historical, and intellectual factors of intersubjective auditory experience. A reformulation for the project of productive analysis is: listening to music is an interpretive activity situated within the broader context of musical experience. The significance of sounding musical events arises from the activities of humans who engage their world within the broader context of musical experience that is both intersubjective and contingent.17 In the second strategy, Ihde investigates auditory experience from a critical perspective as afforded by the tools of post-phenomenological philosophy. Rather than taking perception or listening as self-evident and unmediated, critical phenomenology approaches listening as an activity of musical experience, and it is the content of those acts of listening that, in the words of Joan Scott, “we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced” (Scott 1991, 787). Incorporating a critical phenomenology as part of the investigative process of analysis serves to recognize the reflexivity, mediation, and malleability of musical experience and it (hopefully) restrains the analyst from understanding specific analytical methods and concepts as transparent to analytical goals.18

Music Analysis–Producing Knowledge  77 Listening for Ihde is a dynamic and interpretive engagement with sounding events of the world, a formulation I embrace here for music. Often, however, in writings about music listening is opposed to hearing, and the meaning of these two terms toggle back and forth. In some instances listening is posed as the apprehension of sounding significance and hearing as the physical processes of the body’s auditory system, processes often construed as passive. In other instances these meanings are reversed.19 The subtle differences of meaning or why the meanings toggle between the two terms are not of central concern for my project. Rather I understand both hearing and listening as activities of human knowing, of making sense of musical sounding, but for clarity I mostly use listening as the operative concept. While sometimes assigned only to audiences, listening is a defining activity of musical experience for creators, performers, critics, analysts—indeed for anyone who engages music. Listening is an embodied activity having a full range of kinaesthetic, intermodal, affective, and cognitive features contributing to musical experiences that are dynamic and intersubjective. It is an activity both of individuals and something shared amongst a community of listeners; in other words, the listening activities of individuals shape listening within a community and the community shapes the listening of individuals. An understanding of listening as a culturally, socially, and historically generated activity of musical experience affects how one approaches musical works analytically. Listening engagements with a specific musical work are shaped by contingencies both of the individual who listens and of the broader historical, social, and cultural forces of a listening community. The musical work, then, is enacted through such ongoing and reflexive listening engagements. Put another way, the becoming of a musical work arises through the dynamic and contingent processes of musical listening. As a defining activity for all who encounter music, listening includes diverse types of aural engagements. It may be a straightforward activity of making sense of musical presentations, or it may entail a reflective engagement on what one is hearing or has heard. The distinction here is not between “active” and “non-active” listening, but rather between acts of listening and reflection on such listening experiences. Reflective activities might entail listening for some specific sound or grouping of sounds in a goal-directed listening encounter; or they might entail using words, gestures, or other such demonstrative means to take account of musical experiences. And while both non-reflective and reflective activities of listening affect the becoming of musical works, it is the latter type that is explicitly involved in musical analysis. Music analysis is a formal process of reflective engagement with musical works with the goal of producing knowledge by proposing new modes of engaging the work and as such contributing to the work’s becoming. To understand listening as an integral component of a musical work’s becoming has ramifications for the concept of musical structure. No longer a fixed set of structural properties, a musical work is a malleable yet recognizable sounding event, and its becoming is enacted through the structuring

78  Part I of time by its musical sounds. In these processes of becoming a work accomplishes what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari conceive as the function of art: music “thinks the world.” In a late work for the two authors, What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and ­Guattari define three “great forms of thought”—philosophy, art, and science— and assert their equal status. Philosophy is the creation of concepts, science the determination of functions, and art the composition of monuments through sensations. Art then is not a reflection of the world but a form of thought, or in other words for my purposes, music is a way of “thinking the world” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, passim). Musical works and our engagements with them in acts of listening accomplish this thinking through musical sounding. Or in other words, through the temporal succession of its sounds, a musical work enacts a “sound-thinking”—a sonic mode of thinking the world. Such a sound-thinking does not involve concepts like philosophy or functions like science but rather sounding monuments—works—that engage us sensuously as embodied, affective, and intersubjective beings in the world. And it is to this sound-thinking of music that I turn next. 2.  Sound-thinking: musical things and the structuring of musical time The sound-thinking of music occurs temporally, molding and sculpting the flow of musical time. Such sound-thinking involves all aspects of musical experience: it is an embodied, enculturated, and intersubjective engaging of the world. In this sense, sounding-thinking encompasses listening as an interpretive musical knowing. I use the term sound-thinking here to focus specifically on musical works and the particular ways that sound-thinking characterizes their becoming. In focusing on musical works I do not mean to dismiss the ways that performance and listening (reflective and non-reflective) participate in the becoming of musical works, but rather to draw attention to the operative features of music’s modes of thinking the world. This is a focus on the “sounding things” of musical experience and how they sculpt and mold—how they enact a structuring of—musical time. As has been amply demonstrated in post-structuralist thought, there is no single origin for the sound-thinking of a musical work. Creators, performers, listeners as embodied and enculturated individuals all play a role, and their contributions need to be taken into account in a work’s musical becoming. My focus here on individual works in the full sense of their multiplicity and becoming highlights the particular ways that this music thinks the world. In other words, I focus on the specific but multiple ways of “making sense” that a musical work enacts in the broad context of intersubjective musical experience. And since a work’s sound-thinking is enacted through sounds and their temporal successions, it is to these details that a productive analysis turns.

Music Analysis–Producing Knowledge  79 In addressing the matter of how a work makes sense, productive analysis focuses not on “how does it work?” in Bent’s formulation but rather on the myriad ways in which musical sounds do or might present themselves as meaningful sensations in their processes of temporal becoming. This focus of productive analysis requires an engagement with musical sounds, either singly or in groupings, occurring across a continuum of shorter and longer temporal spans. Such meaningful sounds may be usefully conceived as the “things” of music, events that participate in a work’s musical thinking. For instance, the conventional concepts of melody, motive, and chord refer to musical things of relatively shorter spans. But not all works enact their sound-thinking through such musical things easily referenced by conventional concepts— this is especially so for recent music. The concept of a musical thing then allows more flexibility in analytical investigation for addressing how works present sounds as having musical sense.20 For instance, in the passage from Anna Clyne’s Steelworks referenced earlier, the tape part includes various sample factory sounds—falling metal, steam engine, electric buzzing.21 Each of these sound events may be understood as a musical thing. While it might be possible to think of the events having the function of a motive, their brevity challenges that usage. Or one might think of the events together as a musical idea, as a rhythmic-textural-timbral event that sets out the terms of the piece’s argument. But the music does not continue through a logical argument based on the developmental identity of the events. Rather, it is the combination, recombination, and deforming of these sounds over the time of Steelworks that shape its musical processes. So, with the concept of musical thing, I do not reject conventional concepts such as motive, melody, harmony, etc., but rather propose it as a more general and flexible mode of addressing musical phenomena. This concept of musical thing might also include such phenomena as an affect, a particular sense of embodiment, a musical shape or gesture, a sense of movement or directionality, a quality of sound, and a memory invoked. The range of possibilities is open-ended, the only constraint being that this is a soundingthing—for instance a sound-affect, a sound-shape, etc.22 Musical things occur over time, enacting various types of groupings, associations, and relationships with other musical things. Productive analysis takes account of how these groupings of musical things accomplish the sound-thinking of a work, or in other words, of how the succession of events makes sense. Such analysis is focused not on identifying the structure of a work but rather on the processes of the work’s becoming. Analysis takes account of this becoming—this structuring of musical time—either with conventional musical concepts, borrowed concepts from other domains of thought, or newly developed concepts. The long and fertile history of thought about music’s temporal organization provides a vibrant source of concepts that might be utilized to develop an account of how a work accomplishes its sound-thinking; or the analyst might turn to recent thought in

80  Part I dynamical systems theory or other fields that takes account of temporal phenomena; or the analyst might develop a new concept. In other words, analytical investigation addresses how a work accomplishes its sound-thinking in an exploratory and open way, scavenging in a range of disciplines for appropriate ways to produce knowledge. 3.  The Analyst: investigating and speculating Discussion in the two preceding sections—on musical works, listening, musical things and sound-thinking—has focused primarily on general issues pertaining to the becoming of musical works and the role of listening for this becoming. This section focuses on the particular role that the music analyst plays in this becoming through the reflective practices of formal musical knowing, and in particular, it focuses on how the analyst’s investigative processes and the resulting speculations contribute to the project of producing knowledge.23 As suggested earlier, I do not define a particular methodology to be employed by analysts but rather lay out some general guidelines that define an analytical approach that is both critical and generative. The processes of productive analysis are open-ended in the sense that analytical engagement with a musical work is ongoing. Since listening encounters are always malleable and refreshed by context, productive analysis should always hold open the promise of new ways of engaging a work. The process, however, can fruitfully be guided by a general operational framework involving stages of investigation and speculation.24 Analytical investigation first addresses a work’s musical sounding, using the strategies of a critical phenomenology that takes account of how a musical work “makes sense” by reflecting on listening experiences. The analyst begins the process by exploring experiential encounters of the work’s sounding and engages the music’s sound-thinking from the perspective of how it makes sense. This is a kind of “material” engagement with sound, not driven by preexisting concepts but investigating the myriad ways that a particular musical work shapes musical experience.25 The investigation then turns to an exploratory engagement with the work that focuses initially on the experiential engagements of the analyst but also addresses the intersubjective contexts of musical experience. Throughout this stage, the analyst thematizes her own complicity in the observations and explores the various factors that shape the work’s sound-thinking within the broader context of musical works and musical listening.26 The analyst investigates the work from diverse perspectives, gathering information about it and considering its potentials. In some ways this aspect of the investigation is like a “fishing expedition” in which the analyst sets out to discover new facets of the work and to explore its sounding potentials.27 Through the investigations, the analyst takes account of the particular perspectives he might bring to the explorations and uses this awareness to search for additional possibilities.

Music Analysis–Producing Knowledge  81 The final speculating stage is the articulation of an analysis. The analysis speculates on how a particular work accomplishes it’s sound-thinking, delineating its musical things and their structuring of musical time. The preceding open-ended investigations play a role in generating the analysis, as does the invention of the analyst. As a speculative account of a work’s sound-thinking, the analysis gives an interpretation, like a musical performance. But unlike a performance of the work, it speculates on the nature of the work’s sound-thinking through concepts and modes of knowing that may be linguistic, gestural, or graphic, or that in other words bring new perspectives to bear on the musical work as sounding event. This speculative analysis then contributes to the work’s becoming—producing knowledge. 4.  Producing knowledge—affecting new musical behaviors I began this chapter with five statements by various authors on the aspirational goals of music analysis, which in slightly different form are these: analysis takes account of how a particular work makes musical sense; generates new forms of musical behavior; queries the conceptual, cultural, and historical factors that shape musical experience; explores the reflexive relation between concept and sensation; and affects our experiential engagements with musical works and music generally. Productive analysis aspires to all of these goals with the purpose of producing knowledge—an ongoing process that will generate involvements with recent music. As an interpretive practice, productive analysis strives not to articulate an “objective truth” about a work’s unchanging structure. Rather it seeks an “experiential truth” that takes account of a work’s becoming in the broad context of intersubjective experience. Productive analysis produces knowledge in the sense that it is a “goad to musical action” in David Lewin’s sense. This is an operative knowledge that encourages us to listen, to think about, to perform, to create, to seek out other music, to share our experiences—or in other words to generate new musical experiences for the future. notes 1. Blum was responding in part to a claim by Gary Tomlinson that analysis should be abandoned since it enforces “the aestheticism and transcendentalism of earlier modernist] ideologies” (Tomlinson 1993, 22). 2. My focus throughout this chapter and indeed the book is on the practices of classical music. Concepts of work, performance, and score within the popular and jazz traditions raise some of the same but also some different issues, which I will not be addressing here. 3. The case of electro-acoustic works strains this model and will be addressed shortly.

82  Part I 4. The relatively new study of recorded performances takes performative differences as thematic, studying the historical trajectory of these differences, the role of recording technologies, regional performance differences, among other things. See Cook et al. 2009 for a useful overview. 5. It certainly is possible to question the assumption that a score defines a work for music of the past, but that is not my concern here. 6. For more on Zorn’s game pieces see Brackett 2008. Gubaidulina’s Second Quartet is discussed in Chapter 6. 7. For instance see Arel 1968. 8. Increasingly the spectral and amplitude representations are used for consideration of musical timbre. See for instance Fales 2002. 9. A scan of Wehinger’s aural score has been posted at YouTube and synchronized with the music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71hNl_skTZQ Accessed October 25, 2014. 10. Jairazbhoy’s observations about the distinctions between objective and subjective transcription in an ethnomusicological context are still apt and apply to the distinctions between these two types of representation (Jairazbhoy 1977). 11. The website of OREMA lists analyses of some electroacoustic works: http:// www.orema.dmu.ac.uk/?q=eorema_journal. Accessed October 25, 2014. 12. Clyne uses the term “tape” in her title but the part is in a fixed digital medium. 13. Peter Szendy makes a similar observation: the concept of work has been transformed by the “instruments” of listening—digital sound files, samplers, mixers, etc.—and we can no longer understand the work according to its “internal categories” (Szendy 2008, 10). 14. In the specific context of music, the 2010 forum on listening in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association provides entry into the larger topic and the various articles supply the relevant bibliographic references. See the volume 135 Supplement. 15. In his 1976 work, Ihde notes that “by living with electronic instruments our experience of listening itself is being transformed …” (Ihde 2007, 5). And more recently, Szendy makes this issue thematic: see Szendy 2008. 16. Recent philosophical work on the posthuman has complicated anthrocentrism. For the present project, I chose to remain focused on human listening. 17. Born also resituates listening within the broader field of musical experience for different reasons in “Listening, Mediation, Event” (Born 2004). 18. A critical phenomenology in the service of productive analysis of music would not, as David Lewin warns against, depend on the evidence of this or that “perception”—a kind of listening activity—for building an analysis (Lewin 1986, passim). Lewin’s characterization of phenomenology was a reading that accorded with his own interests in computational artificial intelligence and an orientation to analytical philosophy. The notion of perception he utilized in the article was premised on ideas from those disciplines. 19. For more on how the terms “listen” and “hear” toggle between the meanings of auditory processing and comprehension in late twentieth and early twentyfirst century musical thought, see the forthcoming dissertation of Benjamin Downs, “Dividing Sense From Sense: Post-War Avant-Garde Aesthetics and the Politics of Listening” (Downs, forthcoming). In a previous work (Fisher and Lochhead 1993) I have used hearing as active knowing but not in distinction to listening. For present purposes, I do not make a distinction between the terms, understanding both as activities of interpretive knowing.

Music Analysis–Producing Knowledge  83 20. My use of the term “thing” follows from the work of Martin Heidegger whose late essay “The Thing” and philosophy in general has inspired recent philosophical work focused on things and objects (Heidegger 2001). See Verbeek 2005 and Harman 2002 and 2011, as well as “Thing Theory” in literary ­studies— see Brown 2003 and 2001. I do not fully follow Heidegger in his distinction between thing and object, but have chosen the term thing instead of object because the former has less of the sense of the tangible and hence is more amenable to m ­ usical phenomena. 21. A recording of Steelworks may be heard on YouTube: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=sfdxg4mHJC0 Accessed October 25, 2014. The work is also recorded on Clyne 2012. 22. In another context, I have written about edges and falling in Wolfgang Rihm’s Am Horizont and their musical meaning as embodied musical things in this work (Lochhead 2010). 23. The next chapter will provide more details on specific features of the investigative process I have employed in my analyses. 24. For present purposes I define these two stages in general terms, and in Chapter 4, I refine the formulation as investigating, mapping, and speculating. These are not different formulations of the operative framework. 25. In using the term “material” I invoke recent materialist thought focusing on the materialities of human existence—physical objects and their forces. While in some sense musical sound has no “matter” in particular, it has forces that affect humans. It is the sounding materialities of music that productive analysis engages. For some recent work on the “new materialism” see Coole and Frost 2010 and Barrett and Bolt 2013. 26. This is not a Husserlian presuppositionless process; rather it is assumes a Heideggerian hermeneutical stance toward musical experience. And at this point in the process, the analyst is more like a participant observer as defined within cultural anthropology, not an “objective observer.” The exploratory stage is considered in more detail in Chapter 4. 27. This is how analysis was once described to me by Leo Treitler.

Works Cited Agawu, Kofi. 2004. “How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back In Again.” Music Analysis 23: 267–286. Arel, Bülent. 1968. Stereo Electronic Music #1: for Five Channels. New York: American Composers Alliance. Barrett, Estelle, and Barbara Bolt, eds. 2013. Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts. London: Taurus. Bent, Ian D., and Anthony Pople. 2014. “Analysis.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed October 25, 2014. http://www. oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/41862. Berio, Luciano. 2006. “Poetics of Analysis.” Remembering the Future. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Blum, Stephen. 1992. “In Defense of Close Reading and Close Listening.” Current Musicology 53: 41–54. Born, Georgina. 2004. “Listening, Mediation, Event.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135, Supplement 1:79–89.

84  Part I Brackett, John. 2008. John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brown, Bill. 2001. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28: 1–22. ———. 2003. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. ­Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clyne, Anna. 2006. Steelworks. New York: Boosey and Hawkes. Cook, Nicholas, Erik Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and John Rink. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Downs, Benjamin. Forthcoming. “Dividing Sense From Sense: Post-War AvantGarde Aesthetics and the Politics of Listening,” Stony Brook University. Fales, Cornelia. 2002. “The Paradox of Timbre.” Ethnomusicology 46: 179–238. Fisher, George and Lochhead, Judy. 1993. “Analysis, Hearing and Performance,” Indiana Theory Review 14/1:1–36. Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Peru, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company. ———. 2011. Quadruple Object. Alresford, UK: Zero Books. Heidegger, Martin. 2001 [1971]. “The Thing,” Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: HarperCollins. [Essay first published in 1951 in German.] Hovda, Eleanor. 1988. Lemniscates, for string quartet (manuscript). Ihde, Don. 2007 [1976]. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. 2d ed. Albany: State University of New York Press. Jairazbhoy, Nazir. 1977. “The ‘Objective’ and Subjective View in Music Transcription.” Ethnomusicology 21: 263–274. Lewin, David B. 1986. “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception.” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3: 327–392. Lochhead, Judith. 2010. “The Logic of Edge: Wolfgang Rihm’s Am Horizont.” In Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, edited by Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, 181–197. Surrey, England: Ashgate. Scott, Joan. 1991. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17: 773–797. Szendy, Peter. 2008 [2001]. Listen: A History of Our Ears. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Thomalla, Hans. 2010. Albumblatt for String Quartet. Berlin Edition Juliane Klein. Tomlinson, Gary. 1993. “Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer.” And “Tomlinson Responds.” Current Musicology 53: 18–24 and 36–35. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Translated by Robert P. Crease. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Wehinger, Rainer. 1970. Artikulation, Elektronische Musik, eine Hörpartitur [of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Artikulation]. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne.

4 Reconceiving Structure Investigating, Mapping, Speculating

The renovation of analytical inquiry entails reconception of both the high modern concept of structure and the methods and concepts of investigating, mapping, and speculating about music. In other words, the reconception of musical structuring also involves a reconception of how analysts study, articulate, and conceptualize musical works. My project of reconceiving structure, then, encompasses both the activities of doing analysis and of conceptualizing music’s structuring of time. Further, while this project might be understood as primarily an activity of the analyst, reconceiving structure is also an activity of creators, performers, and listeners. My focus in this book grows out of a specific sense that the reconceiving of music by creators has not been matched in recent years by a rethinking of how music’s structuring arises, how it may be articulated, and how it may be conceptualized. As such, the reconceiving I propose here entails not simply a conceptual adjustment on the part of the analyst, but takes into account the activities of creators, performers, and listeners. Since reconceiving structure is a dynamic and reflexive process of listening, creating, and performing, these activities needs to be woven into the procedures and goals of critical accounts of music. My approach to the dynamic processes of musical investigating, mapping, and speculating that shape productive analysis is indebted to a broad array of thinkers and fields of inquiry. These include various strands of “post-philosophies” and recent thought in cartography. While it is important to acknowledge these debts, a full accounting of the ideas and working procedures that have generated my own approach is beyond the scope of this project. However, along the way I will make reference to these authors, their ideas, and procedures, hopefully providing the necessary breadcrumbs for those who want to follow the path toward these sources. The processes of productive analysis are open but guided by some general working procedures that are the topic of this chapter. These procedures include three roughly chronological stages of analytical activities, which together outline a pathway toward productive analysis. These three activities are: investigating, mapping, and speculating. The first investigative stage of these working procedures is motivated by post-phenomenological philosophy and includes investigation of the musical work as sounding from

86  Part I sensory-hermeneutical perspectives. The second mapping stage is informed by cartography and has the goal of articulating the work as a multidimensional musical thinking. The third speculating stage builds upon the prior two and constructs a speculative account of the work as a historically, socially, and culturally embedded structuring of musical time, a sound-thinking of the world in the Deleuzian sense. This third stage does not end the process of productive analysis but rather begins an interpretive formulation that hopefully generates further investigating, mapping, and speculating. I. Investigating This first stage is motivated by the sensory-hermeneutic procedures of post-phenomenological philosophy.1 The investigation focuses on the musical things of musical experiences from the perspectives of what Ihde has called “microperceptions” and “macroperceptions”2 (Ihde 1990, 29). The term microperception refers to the sensory aspects of human experience, including hearing, vision, touch, taste, smell, and all aspects of embodiment generally.3 Macroperception refers to the cultural, social, and historical features that shape the background of human experience. Both microperception and macroperception are construed as hermeneutical engagements with the world. But it is useful to distinguish them since human praxis is such that we are not often aware of sensory involvement with the world as a hermeneutical activity. It is important, however, to recognize that these two aspects of experience are reflexively related and as Ihde points out: “There is no microperception (sensory-bodily) without its location within a field of macroperceptions and no macroperception without its microperceptual foci” (Ihde 1990, 29). Together these two aspects of human experience constitute what Edmund Husserl, in his late philosophy, called the lifeworld. Further development and critique of the concept by such writers as Merleau-Ponty and especially Jűrgen Habermas bring out the dynamic nature of the lifeworld. Referring to Husserl’s concept, Dermot Moran points out that the lifeworld is “the general structure which allows objectivity and thinghood to emerge in the different ways in which they do emerge in different cultures ...”4 Within the Husserlian concept there is no single lifeworld but rather a set of “intersecting and overlapping worlds” that are intersubjectively constituted (Moran 2001, 182). The lifeworld is contingent culturally, socially, and historically but at the same time serves as the horizon of meanings for individual experiences. Habermas’s significant contribution comes from his assertion of a prior social component, what he calls “communicative action.”5 As Bohman and Rehg point out, in Habermas’s theory “speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals on a basis of shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit-worthy” (Bohman and Rehg 2011). It is through these actions of

Reconceiving Structure  87 social coordination that the lifeworld emerges as a horizon of meaning.6 Habermas’s emphasis on communicative actions provides a specific basis for understanding the lifeworld not as a static structure that endows a universal meaning but rather as a dynamic web of concepts, habits, training, beliefs, etc., within which meaningful experiences occur and people act. The things of musical experiences—the focus of this first stage of investigating—are situated within the lifeworld conceived as the intersubjectively constituted horizon of music’s sensibilities and as a site of musically communicative actions. This investigative stage approaches a musical work as it is constituted in musical experiences and explores the work in its sounding from sensory-hermeneutical perspectives, heeding Joan Scott’s exhortation to produce knowledge about experience (Scott 1991, 787). By attending to the musical things of experience through the ears of both micro- and macroperceptions, the analyst investigates the work as a sensoryhermeneutical phenomenon, exploring the reflexive relation between bodily sensation and interpretive contexts. And while the sensory and the hermeneutical may not be fully disentangled, it is useful to characterize each more fully in order to explore the nature of their reflexive relation. Microperceptions of musical sound involve bodily engagements with its sounding, either in the time of its occurring or through memory or anticipation. A focus on the bodily and actional nature of knowing has grown from the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. In The Phenomenology of Perception, he shows how the active body serves as the means of intersubjective knowing and how such knowing is shaped through the body’s intersensory intentions toward the world. For Merleau-Ponty things of the world are “intersensory entit[ies]” that I know through the “integrated actions” of the body’s capacities of hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, as well as other related capacities of movement, pain, temperature, and the like: “the brittleness, hardness, transparency and crystal ring of a glass all translate a single manner of being” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 166–67). Musical things of experience are similarly constituted in experience as intersensory entities. Common descriptions of musical sound as bright or dark, or sharp or flat are already evidence of this intrasensory-bodily knowing. And during this investigative stage of inquiry, the analyst takes account of these microperceptions of musical sound using the full resources of intrasensory-bodily knowing.7 Macroperceptions stand in a reflexive relation to microperceptions, each affecting the other in a dynamic process of knowing. Macroperceptions may be understood as more explicitly hermeneutical, situating the sensory experiences of microperception historically, socially, and culturally. But the reflexive relation between micro- and macroperception indicates the hermeneutical and sensory aspects of both. The specific sense of hermeneutical knowing that I adopt here follows from Heidegger’s ontological approach to hermeneutics. Christina Lafont points to the “radical paradigm shift” that Heidegger enacts in Being and Time by articulating hermeneutics not as a “method for interpreting authoritative texts … but as a way

88  Part I of understanding human beings themselves … [T]o be human is not to be a rational animal but first and foremost to be a self-interpreting animal” (Lafont 2005, 265; Heidegger 1962). The macro- and microperceptions of human experience are then activities of interpretive engagement with a world already shaped through intersubjective processes that are historical, cultural, and social. Building on Heidegger’s philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer redirected hermeneutics to the nature of understanding in the human sciences.8 This shift took him back to questions of how humans understand and interpret “texts” of various sorts and to a focus on the historical, social, and cultural nature of understanding and interpretation. Further, this shift is accompanied by an approach to understanding not from the perspective of an individual (Heidegger’s Dasein) but rather, as P. Christopher Smith puts it, on how individuals “participat[e] in the community of those who understand. He or she moves from I to we”9 (Smith 2011, 24). Gadamer’s hermeneutics is not, as Moran reminds us, “a new technique or art of understanding, rather … [it is] a genuinely philosophical description of the nature and role of human understanding in general” (Moran 2001, 279). From this Gadamerian perspective then both micro- and macroperceptions are interpretive understandings of the world that are constituted historically, socially, and culturally. Through the processes of analytical investigating delineated here, the analyst encounters a work from the perspective of a Heideggerian/Gadamerian ontological hermeneutics and from the perspectives of both micro- and macroperceptions, plotting the dimensions of musical understanding as ­ both sensory and hermeneutic. The critical stance involved in investigation of the hermeneutical dimensions of musical understanding is crucial to my larger project here—that of reconceiving structure. This critical stance does not, however, imply an objective assessment since as historically, culturally, and socially constituted beings, we never can escape the hermeneutical horizons of our own situations. And as Richard J. Bernstein points out “if we want to ‘describe’ other forms of life … then one can do this only by adopting a ‘performative’ attitude of one who participates in a process of mutual understanding” (Bernstein 1986, 352). A productive analysis can only be successful if the analyst participates directly in hermeneutical knowing— hermeneutical hearing—of a work and takes that hearing not as a given but as historically, culturally, and socially constituted as musical experience. The critical perspectives that are brought to bear in the investigating of the micro- and macroperceptions of musical understanding are central to the productive analysis of recent musical practices. As the first stage of productive analysis, the processes of investigating have two components that are not sequential. One focuses on microperceptions and hence on sensory features of musical experience, the other on macroperceptions and hence on the hermeneutical features of musical experience. The following discussion considers each and lays out some strategies

Reconceiving Structure  89 for investigating music from micro- and macro-perspectives. These are by no means meant to delimit a methodology but only to suggest possible modes of participatory address through a process of experiential variation.

A. Investigating Microperceptual Experiences of Music Investigation of a musical work’s sounding begins with the analyst’s reflection on her/his own experiential encounters with it. The analyst’s experience inscribes her own “situated hearing”—in a reframing of Haraway’s influential work in the philosophy of science.10 But at the same time, it inscribes the intersubjective horizons of musical understanding. Following Gadamer and Habermas, investigative encounters with a musical work begin with the premise that musical understanding occurs within a community and through communicative action amongst the members of the community. Music “makes sense” because hearing is situated through a musical version of communicative action amongst listeners. The intersubjective horizons of musical understanding, which was earlier introduced through the concept of the lifeworld, serve as “the general structure which allows objectivity and thinghood to emerge …” (Moran 2001, 182). The turn toward microperceptions in this component of investigating focuses on these musical things of experience and how they accomplish sound-thinking. As indicated in the previous chapter, musical things are sounding events that enact a work’s structuring of musical time. In order to develop a sense of how musical things accomplish such structuring, I have been influenced by the post-phenomenological work of Peter-Paul Verbeek in the philosophy of technology11 (Verbeek 2005). Because of their eventful character, musical things share with things in post-phenomenological thought a role in praxis, and as Verbeek points out, “must be approached pragmatically, i.e., in relation to the behavior of human beings” (Verbeek 2005, 78). Such praxis for musical things involves how they accomplish sound-thinking, or in other words, how in human musical experience the sounding things perform the work as eventful. The investigative focus on microperceptual experience approaches musical things in terms of such praxis by addressing their roles in the structuring of time. And since musical things and their roles are multiple during the sounding of works, investigations of microperceptions turn to how the musical things of experience create “networks” of musical thinking (paraphrasing Verbeek 2005, 95). As I use the term here, a musical thing is distinct conceptually from a musical object.12 Musical things are sounding events playing a role in the flow of musical time and their features are conceptualized as having temporal functions; musical objects, however, tend to be conceived atemporally in terms of their properties—the parameters of pitch, duration, timbre, dynamics, and the like.13 In investigating the sounding things of musical experience, however, the analyst will necessarily engage them in atemporal ways through reflection and further investigating and consider them by taking

90  Part I note of their sounding features. By turning to a concept of musical things within microperceptual experience, I mean to emphasize the role that they play in the work’s structuring of time, or in other words their praxis in sounding-thinking. One obvious difference between what Heidegger and Verbeek mean by things and what I propose here is that musical things have no visible or tangible experiential presence as do hammers or computer keyboards.14 But otherwise the concept of thing applies well to sounding events. Musical things have an aural-vibratory and temporal presence characterized by the perceptual characteristics of sound and the temporal characteristics of duration, succession, and coherence. And musical things occur through the micro- and macroperceptual engagements with music by creators, performers, and listeners. Musical things arise in musical experience as the temporal events that constitute the sound-thinking of a work.15 Or in other words, musical things enact the becoming of the work. Musical things may include a wide variety of temporal phenomena, and the task here is not to define some exclusionary limits but only to suggest some possibilities. Musical things may include the sorts of constituent elements Bent mentions in his “Analysis” entry, such as a chord, phrase, melody, rhythm, motive, harmony.16 And they may also include a particular timbral configuration, an affective association, a cultural reference, a particular sort of embodiment, and so on. In other words, a musical thing may include a wide array of phenomena, such phenomena reflecting the intrasensory and hermeneutical engagements with musical sounding by creators, performers, listeners, and the analyst. In investigating a work’s musical things, the analyst sets up a broad range of sounding encounters with it, varying the circumstances of these encounters over a period of time. The purpose of such variations is to investigate experiential differences that reveal some of the hermeneutical dimensions of microperceptual phenomena.17 For instance, depending on the nature of the musical work, the investigation could include hearing live performances, listening to one or more recorded performances using different playback setups (speakers, headphones, etc.), studying the score, practicing and performing the work, or imaginatively performing the work. The analyst could also engage others in these variations, asking listeners to report on their own experiential encounters. These variations allow the analyst to explore how the differences between such experiential encounters affect the multiplicity of the work’s sound-thinking. Investigations of the things of microperceptual experience take account of musical things and the nature of their roles in the sound-thinking of the work. Such accounts of the things of musical experience focus on the sensations of musical sounding—that is, on the “sounding materiality” of music.18 The accounts of experiential encounters can take any of several possible modes or their combination: verbal or written; graphics, including traditional notation; three-dimensional renderings; and so on. These

Reconceiving Structure  91 accounts are working documents and may or may not be explicitly utilized in later phases of the analytical process. The accounts serve to provide a record of the analyst’s encounters with the sounding work.

B. Investigating Macroperceptual Experiences of Music Investigation of macroperceptions continues the strategy of variation but the focus broadens to include the perspectives of creators, performers, listeners, as well as that of the analyst. As suggested at the beginning of this chapter, the dynamic and reflexive processes of musical structuring involve creators, performers, and listeners as culturally, socially, and historically situated actors, and as a consequence their perspectives are central to an account of macroperceptual experiences. For present purposes, macroperceptual investigations focus specifically on i) the situated roles of creator, performer, and analyst; ii) the cultural, social, historical situation of the work; and iii) the situation of the work’s reception. These different sub-sections within the investigation of macroperceptual experiences explore the various dimensions that shape the micro- and macroperceptions of a work. Of the three subsections here, none refer to the listener specifically, although listeners are addressed within the discussion of reception. However, listening is the assumed background activity for all types of musical behaviors—creating, performing, analyzing—and hence I understand it as an implicit aspect of all micro- and macroperceptual experience.19 i) Situated Roles of Creators, Performers, and the Analyst Creators, performers, and analysts engage music from individual perspectives that are shaped by a variety of factors, including social and economic conditions, physiological characteristics, educational background, musical training, cultural expectations, and so on. These factors situate the activities of creators, performers, and the analyst as historically, socially, and culturally embedded. As pertaining to creators and performers, the analyst might investigate these kinds of factors: biographical information as self-reported or articulated by others; aesthetic statements or other kinds of writings by creators and performers; publicity and marketing materials presented by individuals or a third party; the place of the work in the creator’s or performer’s general musical ­output; program notes; performance practices associated with the work (including venue, use of electronic technologies, etc.), and so on. This is by no means an exhaustive list of possible avenues of investigation, simply a sampling. The goal of this sort of inquiry is to provide a basis for the analyst to situate the work in terms of the activities of the creators and performers and to explore how and if aspects of these situations affect microperceptual experiences. The analyst also takes note of her/his own situation, including such factors as educational background and training and any expectations about the work, the creators, and the performers that shape the analyst’s microperceptual

92  Part I experiences and how s/he approaches the project of productive analysis. An analyst’s reflection on her own situated-ness poses different kinds of challenges than research on creators and performers. Nonetheless, acknowledgment that the analyst himself brings a particular perspective to the analytical project is necessary. The goal is not to achieve a “neutral” or “objective” analytical position—the “God’s Eye View”—but rather to recognize the contingency of both musical listening and analytical observation. ii) Cultural, Social, and Historical Situation of the Work and its Sounding Investigation of the cultural, social, and historical situation of musical works targets those factors that serve as the horizons for the work’s sensibility. The focus in this instance is not on the musical behaviors of creators, performers, and analysts. Rather it is on the broader context—the musical lifeworld— that provides a basis for the work’s sensibility, for its sound-thinking. Investigating the horizons of musical sensibility is multifaceted and exploratory, and it is necessarily partial and ongoing since horizons themselves are historically, culturally, and socially mutable. This type of investigating helps to characterize the contingencies not only of the sound-thinking of the work but also of the musical behaviors that give rise to it—behaviors of creators, performers, and analysts. For the analyst, investigation of the multifaceted contexts that situate the work and its sounding consists of taking up a number of different perspectives. These perspectives can direct investigational queries about the differing factors that situate the work. For instance, these queries might engage such factors as: historical context, compositional technique, technology, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, aesthetic philosophy, identity, embodiment, cognition, musical structuring, memory, placial or spatial features, or any number of other perspectives discovered by the analyst. By taking up different perspectives, the analyst explores the multidimensional features of the work in both micro- and macroperceptual experience in relation to its broader horizons of musical sensibility. iii) The Situation of the Work’s Reception Investigation of the work’s reception gathers together any available writings about the work, the creators, performers, and performances that are available through online media, newspapers, journals, books, or other such written records—either public or private. The goal of this research is not to conduct a comprehensive study of how an audience might respond to a work; rather it is to investigate existing responses to the work, creator, and performers. The analyst investigates these writings in order to get a sense of the diversity and nature of the responses of others. The investigation of these written responses provides the opportunity for the analyst to situate

Reconceiving Structure  93 more fully her/his own responses to the work and to illuminate further the analyst’s investigations into the situated roles of creators and performers and into the broader horizons of the work’s musical thinking. The investigating of both micro- and macroperceptual experience is open and exploratory and the analyst is free to pursue as many paths as possible (or as time allows). The investigations allow the analyst to consider any preconceptions s/he might have about a work’s structuring or its expressive character. Throughout these investigative encounters, the analyst engages the musical sounding of a work and takes account of these engagements through various means—verbal, graphic, gestural, and so on—understanding that such accounts themselves are a kind of hermeneutical activity. Further, the analyst engages the work through critical reflection on musical sounding as historically, socially, and culturally contingent. The specific descriptions and critical reflections of these investigations may or may not figure explicitly in the next stages of the analytical process, but rather they provide the informational engine that generates the later phases of productive analysis. II. Mapping Mapping, the next stage of productive analysis, is an activity that results in the making of maps—maps of music. The activity and its results engage the analyst with a musical work, continuing from the investigations of sensory-hermeneutical experiences and creating knowledge of multiple sorts about the work. The mapping stage continues the exploratory trajectory and through the processes of mapping the analyst generates new forms of knowing the work. This mapping stage of productive analysis resonates with recent thought in cartography that includes work in philosophy, cultural geography, and cinema studies. This section first reviews some concepts from cartographic scholarship and then directs them toward musical mapping.

A. Cartographies: Maps and Landscapes The study of mapmaking has a long history, but since the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been increasing interest in the conceptual and perceptual implications of maps. This interest has been generated by a variety of factors, including postmodern emphases on embodiment, human and animal cognition, globalization, and ecology. And within music studies, the research of Watkins on concepts of musical space, of Von Glahn on American musical places, and of Schafer on soundscapes—to name a few—may be understood as contributing to this trend (Watkins 2011, Von Glahn 2003, Schafer 1994). The strands of cartographic research that I have woven into my project here come largely from philosophy and cartography directly. The particular issues pertinent to my project address how maps serve specific cultural and social goals, how they serve ongoing processes

94  Part I of cognition (or hermeneutics), and how maps reflect the embodiment of makers and readers. In The Power of Maps, Denis Wood argues that “maps work … by serving interests”—that is the interests of whoever makes them (Wood 1992, 1). They are not objective representations of the land or the world but rather “social constructions” with a social purpose20 (Wood 1992, 22). Extending Wood’s observations on the social dimensions of maps, Matthew Edney argues in Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India (1765–1843) that maps serve long-range social goals by directly shaping experience: “the forms of representation employed [in maps] to experience and explore the world, [establish] the means whereby the social order permeates those representations in order to recast and recreate itself” (Edney 1997, 36). Maps then are not transparent windows onto the world; rather, by shaping experience they serve the goals and perspectives of those who make them. In his Cartographic Cinema Tom Conley considers the cognitive functions of “mental mapping” that are involved with a spectator’s encounters with cinema. This mapping is both an affective and imaginative geographical plotting of the spectator’s place in relation to the places plotted in the cinema. This turn to the cognitive leads him to observe: “Mental mapping resembles cognitive mapping insofar as the latter describes how individuals negotiate their lives in the places in which they move” (Conley 2007, 19). Wood offers another perspective on the cognitive opportunities afforded by maps: they give us “… a reality that exceeds our vision, our reach, the span of our days, a reality we achieve no other way … [They] point toward a world we might know” (Wood 1992, 4–5). Mapping either as an activity of “mental” orientation or as an activity of plotting the dimensions of the world is centrally implicated in the hermeneutical—or cognitive—engagements we have with our world, including our engagements with music. Issues of embodiment pertaining to the visual representations of maps and landscape paintings are of central concern in Edward S. Casey’s Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps. Taking a broad historical perspective, he demonstrates differences in how painters and mapmakers approach the reimplacement involved in the visual and typically two-dimensional representations of places—either real or imagined. For instance, Casey considers portolan charts, navigational maps for Mediterranean sailors popular between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries.21 These charts do not have conventions for directionality, such that north can be at the bottom of the page. Today a viewer might initially be disoriented by the chart since the “modern map … is conceived as a stable and stabilizing entity situated literally before its viewer” (emphasis in the original, Casey 2003, 179). But in the portolan chart the coastline of the Mediterranean is the orienting “line” of the map, and, used in the ship’s map room, the chart could be rotated as necessary making the stabilizing “in front of” position unnecessary. As Casey maintains, the body as “ineluctably natural and

Reconceiving Structure  95 cultural” forms “alliances with landscape” in various different ways that are themselves represented in the visual forms of maps and landscape paintings (Casey 2003, xvii). In visual accounts of music from traditional notation, to graphic depictions of electroacoustic works, to analytical diagrams, the reader is embodied by the social and cognitive conventions of the account. In these visual accounts, it is typical for time to be shown on the horizontal axis (earlier on the left) and pitch to be shown on the vertical axis (lower on the bottom). Such visualizations are conventions, however, and Casey’s work on landscape paintings and maps here reminds us of the historical and cognitive dimensions of visualizations of music. Further, Casey’s observations on how the viewer is embodied by visual representations provide useful insight into how musical maps position their listeners.

B. Musical Mapping The preceding brief review of some recent work in cartography provides a background for musical mapping. Musical mappings are not “tracings”— following Deleuze and Guattari (2005, 12)—and as such they “construct” rather than “reproduce” the musical world (Wood 1992, 17). Musical mappings embody the particular interests of the analyst, enact a becoming of the work through the cognitive engagements of the analyst, and inscribe the embodied position of the analyst.22 Analytical practices already have some features of musical mapping through either verbal accounts or graphical representations (notably Schenkerian graphs), and the graphical sketches used by some composers are map-like.23 Further, Western music notation serves to map out the elements of a musical performance. In other words, musical mappings of various sorts have been a part of the musical practices of creation, performance, and criticism, serving various purposes. Here, I understand musical mapping as a means, paraphrasing Wood, not to reproduce musical sounding but to link listeners to the musical world the mapping embodies.24 Musical mappings may take different forms and are an integral part of the ongoing analytical encounters of a musical work. Mappings focus on the musical things of a work in all their diversity; and, in the same way that some geographical region might have multiple mappings depending on the interests of the mapmaker, a musical work generates diverse mappings. The processes of mapping serve an exploratory role for the analyst, ­allowing her to hear the work from multiple perspectives. Musical mappings are not meant to serve as prescriptive notation for performance. Rather they have a descriptive function—a description that serves the goal of producing knowledge.25 Maps are typically apprehended visually and in a two- or three-dimensional format (paper or digital). Such formats are convenient but the analyst need not restrict himself to that format necessarily. Rather, the mapping encounters should be creative explorations of the work’s musical thinking. Mappings in

96  Part I a two- or three-dimensional format may involve graphic symbols of various sorts, including traditional musical notation, colors, etc. The analyst might also explore three-dimensional mappings involving objects with differing shapes or textures, or explore mappings with animations in the effort to capture a work’s temporality. Mappings may address any aspects of a work’s musical thinking, from the nature of things operating within a short time span to longer aspects of musical shaping and organization. Mappings take account of the things of musical experience as temporally constituted and remembered, and in a certain sense, mapping serves as a sort of process of remembering. As a recording of the analyst’s ongoing engagement with a musical work, mapping may—if it is successful—generate new musical behaviors of listening, performing, and creating. Musical mappings embody the analyst’s ongoing encounters with the sounding materiality of a musical work. They are not then a valorization of musical structure per se but rather they embody the analyst’s encounters with the sound-thinking of a musical work. As such, the multiple mappings of a work that result from this second stage of productive analysis may or may not figure explicitly in the final speculative stage. III. Speculating In this last stage, the analyst produces an analysis that speculates on the work’s structuring of musical time.26 This is an interpretive account that flows from the activities of investigating and mapping. The analyst’s perspective is explicit in this analysis but that perspective is generated and shaped by the critical explorations of these two preceding stages. My characterization of the activities of the analyst as speculative in accounting for music’s structuring acknowledges and affirms the musical work not as a fixed structure but rather as a bundle of sounding relations that are, in Deleuzian terms, in a process of becoming. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the term “speculative” may describe the risky practices of traders that led to what has become known as the “Great Recession” or some theory based on incomplete evidence. But the term also has historical resonance in music studies as a type of theoretical work that is not simple application of existing theory but rather development of new modes of understanding formulated as music theories. Here I sustain that interest in new modalities of understanding, but I have chosen to focus this speculative project on the analysis of a musical work as a network of sounding possibilities. The task of the analyst is to engage in a process of speculating on the musical things and their relations as possibilities or tendencies. Speculating then serves the goal of producing knowledge about the sounding of a musical work. Conceptualizing the musical work not as a fixed structure but rather as a network of sounding possibilities leads inevitably to reconceiving structure.

Reconceiving Structure  97 Rather than conceiving musical structure as a linear, causal, and hence unified whole, I approach the sound-thinking of a musical work as temporally manifest and relationally pliable. And I turn to the concept of emergence that has been articulated in millennial scholarship in the philosophy of science and in various “post-philosophies.” Notable in this scholarship, Manuel DeLanda has brought together science studies and philosophy to illuminate Deleuze’s philosophy and to articulate a robust concept of emergence as part of realist ontology. For present purposes, emergent structurings of music refer to the “immanent patterns” that emerge from the relations between musical things during the work’s sounding and that generate the work’s “interactional possibilities” (DeLanda 2011a, passim). For DeLanda immanent patterns arise from the interactions between component parts of a whole and those interactions include complex relations that go beyond simple causal relations. While an emergent property of the whole arises from these interactions as immanent patterns, the interactions themselves are variable and affected by a complex of factors generated by the component parts themselves. Because this variability assures the emergence of novel patterns, an accounting of the parts and their interactions focuses on what DeLanda calls the “structure of the possibility space” (DeLanda 2011a, 390). The concept of emergence provides an insightful way to address a musical work as a structuring of musical time that arises from a multiplicity of interactional relations. Musical structure is not an unchanging feature of a work but rather something that emerges as a structuring in particular circumstances of listening. Analysis, then, focuses not on “a structure” but on the emergent structurings—the possibility space—that a musical work generates in listening contexts understood as historically, socially, and culturally contingent.27 During this last speculative stage, the analyst presents an accounting of emergent structurings of the musical work, posing an interpretive account or demonstrating a range of possibilities. The analysis itself may be understood to emerge from the various investigative encounters and the exploratory mappings of the previous stages. This speculating may take various linguistic and graphic forms, as typically occurs with music analyses. The graphic renderings may have map-like characteristics, perhaps flowing from the prior exploratory mappings. And the analyst can choose to use any conceptual tools appropriate to the project of productive analysis presented here. The only restrictions are that the conceptual tool itself be subject to critical appraisal for its appropriateness to the analytical speculations. In other words, no existing music analytical or theoretical tool should be taken to have a preexisting authority, and any new conceptual approach or analytical tool should not be taken as authoritative because of its novelty. The analyst’s speculating about the work’s emergent structuring—about its sound-thinking—is both productive and reflective. The analysis produces knowledge about a musical work, but at the same time it embodies its contingent status as historically, socially, and culturally constituted.

98  Part I Productive Analysis In the previous chapter, I identified the five aspirational goals of productive analysis: for Bent—analysis explains how a piece “works”; for Lewin— analysis is a “goad … to musical action …”; for Blum—analysis “enables us to recognize and alter our habitual responses”; for Berio—analysis “confirms and celebrates an ongoing dialogue between the ear and mind”; and for Agawu—analysis “sharpens the listener’s ear, enhances perception and … deepens appreciation.” In the terms of this chapter, these goals are: analysis focuses on the emergent sound structuring of a musical work; it generates new forms of musical behavior; it critically engages the perspectives of creators, performers, listeners, and analyst; it critically explores the sensoryhermeneutic nature of musical experience; and it generates new modes of musical experience. In other words, analysis produces knowledge about musical works and musical experience. I offer the analytical chapters of Part II as instances of these aspirational goals.

notes 1. In particular, I have been influenced by Ihde’s phenomenologies of sound and Casey’s phenomenologies of place. See Ihde 2007 and 1990, and Casey 1997, 2003, and 2009. 2. Following Merleau-Ponty, Ihde understands perception as already interpretive, not as a registering of sensory data. Ihde refers to these as first and second phenomenologies in his Experimental Phenomenology (Ihde 2012). 3. Recent research in neuroscience has complicated the definition of what constitutes a sense. See Bossomaier 2012 for a good introduction to the topic of the senses. 4. Christian Beyer and Moran also point out the similarities between Husserl’s formulation of the lifeworld with Heidegger’s concept of In-der-Welt-Sein and Wittgenstein’s concept of “form of life” (Beyer 2013). 5. See Habermas 1984 for the primary articulation of his theory of “communicative action.” 6. Habermas distinguishes system from lifeworld in Habermas 1984, but that distinction is not crucial to my project here. See Heath 2011 and Bohman and Rehg 2014. 7. Some writers on music have pursued this intersensory nature of microperceptions through the concept of metaphor or cognitive studies. See in particular Guck 1994, Larson 2012, Cox 2006 and 2001, and Zbikowski 2002. 8. For Gadamer’s major philosophical work on hermeneutics see Gadamer 2000. 9. I simplify both Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s positions and the differences between them and focus only on those issues that are central to clarifying hermeneutical aspects of the investigative encounters. 10. See Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Haraway’s concept of situational knowledge both recognizes the “historical contingency for any knowledge claims and

Reconceiving Structure  99 knowing subjects … and a commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world …” (Haraway 1988, 579). 11. Thinking about things and objects has proliferated in recent years. Some of this work includes the object-oriented philosophy of Harman 2002 and 2011 and Bryant 2011 and in literary studies the thing theory of Bill Brown 2003 and 2001. 12. In an earlier work, I used the term “temporal object” to designate, for the most part, what here I call musical things: see Lochhead 1982. With the term thing I mean to include a wide array of experiential features of sounding phenomena and to invoke the roles musical things play in specific musical works—how they contribute to a work’s sound-thinking. The concept of “sound object” has been the subject of recent historical and theoretical work in the context of electroacoustic musical practices. See in particular Kane 2014. 13. In the context of his thinking about tools, Heidegger characterized the difference with the terms “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden) for tools as things and “present-tohand” (vorhanden) for objects. This distinction is useful here to a certain extent, but only minimally since I do not want to consider musical things as tools. 14. See Heidegger 2001 for his essay “The Thing.” 15. The reader will note that I avoid here the language of part/whole since this terminology implies a kind of causal logic that I do not want to assume operates in music. It may in certain instances but it is not a necessary component of musical temporality. 16. Previously cited in Chapter 2: see Bent 2014. 17. These variations are not to be confused with Husserlian reductions; rather, my approach here is informed by postphenomenological philosophy. Ihde’s Experimental Phenomenology is a good introduction to investigative practices of this sort. See Ihde 2012. 18. I use the term “materiality” here to refer to music’s sonorous effects, its vibratory presence that may be felt but not seen or touched directly. Some recent humanistic research on the materiality of things bears some similarity to my approach to sonic things. One obvious difference is that the things in this research are tangible and visual phenomena, sometimes referred to as concrete objects. See Brown 2003, Coole and Frost 2010, and Barrett and Bolt 2013. 19. In using the term “situate” here I do not mean that the situational status of a work and its performances is fixed or static. This status is itself situated and changes over time, in different contexts and with different people. As Haraway reminds us, “knowledge statements and knowing subjects” are historically contingent, but such contingency does not absolve us from the “commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world …”–or in this context faithful accounts of sounding music (Haraway 1988, 579). 20. Some twenty years earlier, Michel Foucault noted the social and cultural functions of spatial configurations, demonstrating how social power is wielded in the design of institutions—such as prisons. See Foucault 1995. 21. The interested reader can view the portolan chart Casey discusses at: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b550070918/f7.item. Accessed August 2, 2014. 22. I have addressed issues of visualizing music in Lochhead 2006. 23. For instance, see Anna Clyne’s sketches for her 2012 work Night Ferry at: http://chicagoclassicalreview.com/2012/02/anna-clynes-night-ferry-set-to-sailafter-a-long-creative-voyage/. Accessed August 2, 2014. In this interview Clyne describes how she created a “canvas” so that she can “see the structure.”

100  Part I 24. Wood’s statements are: “Maps construct—not reproduce—the world” (17) and the more “meaningful question [is] how the map links its readers to the world it embodies” (18). 25. The terms prescriptive and descriptive music-writing were defined by Seeger in the context of his ethnomusicological transcriptions: see Seeger 1958. The concepts were developed further by Jairazbhoy: see Jairazbhoy 1977. 26. Some may understand the practice of analysis as inextricably linked to the modern project that was the subject of Chapter 1. I embrace the term here because of its historical resonance with practices that address music through close reading, as Blum has argued (Blum 1992). 27. See also De Landa 2011b.

Works Cited Barrett, Estelle, and Barbara Bolt, eds. 2013. Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts. London: Taurus. Bent, Ian D., and Anthony Pople. 2014. “Analysis.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed October 25, 2014. http://www. oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/41862. Bernstein, Richard. 1986. “What is the Difference That Makes a Difference? Gadamer, Habermas, Rorry.” In Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, edited by Brice R. Wachterhauser, 343–376. Albany: State University of New York Press. Beyer, Christian. 2013. “Edmund Husserl.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter Edition). Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed 25 October 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/husserl/. Blum, Stephen. 1992. “In Defense of Close Reading and Close Listening.” Current Musicology 53: 41–54. Bohman, James, and William Rehg. 2011. “Jürgen Habermas.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition). Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed October 25, 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/ entries/habermas/. Bossomaier, Terry. 2012. Introduction to the Senses: From Biology to Computer Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Bill. 2001. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28: 1–22. ———. 2003. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bryant, Levi. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Casey, Edward S. 1997. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2003. Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2009. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. 2d ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clyne, Anna. 2012. “Creating Night Ferry.” Uploaded 26 January 2012. Accessed August 2, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-3rT_b8nL0. Conley, Tom. 2007. Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Reconceiving Structure  101 Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Cox, Arnie. 2001. “The Mimetic Hypothesis and Embodied Musical Meaning.” Musicae Scientiae 5: 195–209. ———. 2006. “Hearing, Feeling, Grasping Gestures.” In Music and Gesture, edited by Anthony Gritten and Elaine King, 45–60. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate. DeLanda, Manuel. 2011a. “Emergence, Causality, and Realism.” The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, 381–392. Melbourne: re.press. ———. 2011b. Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2005 [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edney, Matthew H. 1997. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1995 [1977]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2000 [1960]. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Windsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. 2d ed. New York: Continuum. Guck, Marion. 1994. “Rehabilitating the Incorrigible.” Theory, Analysis, and Meaning in Music, edited by Anthony Pople, 57–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984 [1981]. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges:The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14: 575–599. Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Peru, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company. ———. 2011. Quadruple Object. Alresford, UK: Zero Books. Heath, Joseph. 2011. “System and Lifeworld.” In Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts, edited by Barbara Fultner, 74–90. Durham: Acumen. Heidegger, Martin. 1962 [1927]. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2001 [1971]. “The Thing.” Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: HarperCollins. [Essay first published in 1951 in German.] Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2007 [1976]. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. 2d ed. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2012 [1977]. Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction. 2d ed. New York: Putnam. Jairazbhoy, Nazir. 1977. “The ‘Objective’ and Subjective View in Music Transcription.” Ethnomusicology 21: 263–274. Kane, Brian. 2014. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic sound in theory and practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Lafont, Christina. 2005. “Hermeneutics.” In A Companion to Heidegger, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, 265–84. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Larson, Steve. 2012. Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

102  Part I Lewin, David B. 1986. “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception.” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3: 327–392. Lochhead, Judith. 1982. “Temporal Structure of Recent Music: A Phenomenological Investigation.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook. ———. 2006. “Visualizing the Music Object.” Expanding (post) Phenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde, edited by Evan Selinger, 67–88. Albany: State University of New York Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962 [1981]. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. Revisions by Forrest Williams. New York: Humanities Press. Moran, Dermot. 2001. An Introduction to Phenomenology. New York: Routledge. Schafer, R. Murray. 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books. Scott, Joan. 1991. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17: 773–797. Seeger, Charles. 1958. “Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing.” The Musical Quarterly 44: 184–195. Smith, P. Christopher. 2011. “Destruktion-Konstruktion: Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur.” In Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics, edited by Francis J. Mootz III and George H.Taylor, 15–39. London: Continuum. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Translated by Robert P. Crease. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Von Glahn, Denise. 2003. The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Watkins, Holly. 2011. Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Denis. 1992. The Power of Maps, with John Fels. New York: Guilford Press. Zbikowski, Lawrence. 2002. Conceptualizing Music. Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

Part II

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5 Technê of Radiance Kaija Saariaho’s Lonh (1996)

A work for soprano, electronics, and electronic sounds, Lonh is a brilliant instance of recently composed music that uses timbral phenomena as structural determinants (Saariaho 1996). My analysis of Lonh shows how these timbral phenomena work in conjunction with text, recurrent sonorities, motivic transformations, and electronically enabled vocal effects to project a sense of musical “radiance.” As I use the term here, radiance is a comprehensive formal property arising from specific musical procedures over the duration of Lonh. The analysis focuses on the technê of radiance in Lonh, that is, on how the formal design of radiance emerges from the processes of musical sounding. In recent years the term and concept of technê has been recycled from Ancient Greek thought within the philosophy of technology, and I engage it here as part of my claim that analytical investigation of the sounding presence of musical phenomena is a necessary part of a critical understanding of music generally and of Lonh in particular. In the earliest Greek contexts, technê was linked to the concept of epistêmê. Typically, technê has been translated as either craft or art, and epistêmê as knowledge, invoking the modern opposition between practice and theory. But in the earliest Greek usage, technê and epistêmê are often used interchangeably, implying that practice enacts knowing of the world. This earliest notion of technê has proven fruitful for recent philosophers of technology. As the etymological forerunner of the modern notion of technology, technê offers a conceptual model for the integration of practice and theory, for the integration of technique and knowing. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his 1955 essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” engaged the ancient Greek concept of technê as part of his argument that technology is a “revealing” or a “bringing-forth” (Heidegger 1977). For Heidegger, a technology reveals or brings forth the reality of the world; this reality is not an absolute existent but rather a contingent presence arising from the relation between humans and the materialities of being. The concept of technê for Heidegger embeds this idea of a reality emerging from practice: our specific ways of encountering the world are a bringing-forth of its reality. Since technologies take the form of tools broadly conceived and hence are used for “doing something,” they are

106  Part II aligned with practice. The development and use of technologies is then a bringing-forth of the reality of the world.1 I invoke the concept of technê here as a motivation for analysis, an analysis that seeks in music’s sounding presence the particular ways that it enacts a bringing-forth of the reality of the world.2 In other words, an analytical engagement with the practical or material details of music leads us to the reality of the sounding world. I construe the materiality of music in broad terms, including but not limited to sound and video recordings, the score, composer commentary, critical reaction, and digital sound analysis (spectra and amplitude). Consideration of how music’s materiality is a bringing-forth of the reality of a world entails a more speculative interpretive analytical stance, but a stance that flows from material details. My analysis demonstrates how Saariaho’s Lonh entails a bringing forth of the sensation of radiance, and the validity of such an assertion will lie in the particular ways that the material details of the work support such an interpretation. The analytical articulation of Lonh’s design offered here reflects a wide variety of factors: the trace of compositional intent as inscribed in the score, critical commentary, other analyses of Saariaho’s music, the composer’s comments about Lonh and other works, engagement with recorded audio and video performances,3 digital sound analysis of the available professionally recorded performance, knowledge of relevant music technologies used in composition, including familiarity with IRCAM procedures,4 knowledge of medieval musical practices, and my own analytical background, preferences, and goals. And while several of these factors may not be explicit in the analysis, all of them figure in the analytical process itself. The analysis of Saariaho’s Lonh here focuses on the most crucial factors contributing to the formal design of radiance. Lonh consists of two strands of musical events as summarized in Table 5.1. These strands include the live soprano, with electronic enhancements, and an electronics part in a fixed medium that is projected through speakers. Table 5.1 also indicates that the text of Lonh is based on a twelfth century troubadour song by Jaufré Rudel and that the electronic strand includes sampled and electronically generated sounds, all produced and manipulated at IRCAM.5

Table 5.1  Lonh, Two Musical Strands. Musical Strands of Lonh miked voice; occasional electronic enhancement, including Live Soprano sustain and reverberation; Text based on 13th century troubador song by Jaufré Rudel Electronic Part fixed-media, sounds projected through four speakers; synthesized and sampled sounds, the latter including various percussion instruments, nature, and voices

Technê of Radiance  107 Saariaho chose to set Jaufré’s song “Lanquand li jorn son lonc en mai” while doing some initial exploratory work for what would be her first opera, L’amour de loin which is based on Jaufré’s vida and its theme of “love from afar.” She reviewed manuscripts pertaining to Jaufré in the Bibliotèque nationale in Paris,6 after first encountering a 1994 book by Jacques ­Roubaud titled La Fleur Inverse: L’art des Troubadours (Roubaud 1994). For Lonh, Saariaho chose the original language of the text, Occitan (Old Provençal), although the first stanza is to be recited in either modern French or English during the prologue. The form of the piece follows the large stanzaic structure of the poem: it includes a prologue and eight sections corresponding to the poem’s seven stanzas and tornada.7 Saariaho utilizes some aspects of modal design from Jaufré’s song for the vocal melody of Lonh, and she retains the overall poetic focus on the troubadour’s longing for an idealized and unobtainable love, reputed to be a countess in Tripoli.8 Significantly, Saariaho chose to set the text of the male troubadour with a soprano voice, inverting the gender expectations that might arise in connection with the quest for a distant love. Table 5.2 shows the Occitan text and its English translation. In the table different fonts or shadings for the Occitan text indicate the type of text delivery: Times New Roman with light grey shading indicates that the text is not heard at all; Times New Roman-bold that the live soprano sings the text; Times New Roman-italics that the recorded voices present the text; and Verdana that both live and recorded voices present the text but not simultaneously. As Table 5.2 indicates, over the course of Lonh the text as a semantic unit recedes from presence. The texts of the first and second stanzas are stated in their entirety, but from the fifth stanza on only minimal parts of the text are presented. While the form of Lonh is governed by the poetry, its sections are not all of the  same duration. Figure 5.1 indicates the sections and the times at which they begin in the published performance with soprano Dawn Upshaw (Upshaw 1997). Durations of each section are shown above the central ­timeline.9 The fixed medium of the electronics part allows for some small amount of variability in performance: each section has a different track that is cued at the appropriate moment by either the performer or a sound engineer. But because this variability is small, I will be relying on the timings of the recorded performance with Upshaw in my analysis in addition to measure numbers. Timings based on Upshaw 1997. Durations: Sections:

1:20

1:34

Prologue I

2:06 II

38 III

IV

1:49

1:23

2:24

1:22

2:30

V

VI

VII

Tornada

8:06

9:29

11:53

13:15

Time: 1:20

2:54

5:33 6:11

Figure 5.1  Overall Form: Sections, Durations, and Timings.

108  Part II Table 5.2  Lonh, Source poetry: Jaufré Rudel, “Lanqand li jorn son lonc en mai.” Text and Translation from Treitler 1992; differs slightly from Saariaho’s score. I Lanquand li jorn son loc en mai M’es bels douz chans d’auzels de loing, E qand mes sui partitz de lai Remembra-m d’un’ amor de loing; Vauc de talan ebroncs eclis Si que chans ni flors d’albes pis No-m platz plus que I’invern gelatz.

When the days are long in May I like the sweet song of birds from afar; And when I have departed from there, I remember a love from afar; I go sad and bowed with desire So that neither song nor Hawthorn flower Please me more than icy winter.

II Jamais d’amor no-m gauzirai Si no-m gau d’est amor de loing, Qe gensor ni meillor non sai Vas nuilla part ni pres ni loing. Tant es sos pretz verais e fis Que lai el renc dels Sarrazis Fos eu per lieis chaitius clamatz.

Never in love shall rejoice Unless I enjoy this love from afar, For nobler or better I do not know In any direction, near or far, Her worth is so true and perfect That there in the kingdom of the Saracens I would, for her, be proclaimed captive.

III Iratz gauzens m’en partrai Qan veirai cest’amor de loing, Mas non sai coras la-m veirai, Car trop son nostras terras loing: Assatz i a portz e camis. E per aisso no-n sui devis, Mas tot sia cum a Dieu platz!

Sad and rejoicing I shall depart When I shall see this love from afar, But I do not know when I shall see her For our lands are too far. Many are the ports and roads, And so I cannot prophesy, But may all be as it pleases God!

IV Be-m parra jois qan li qerrai Per amor Dieu I’amor de loing. E s’a lieis, plai, albergarai Pres de lieis, si be-m sui de loing. Adones parra-l parlamens fis Qand drutz loindas er tant vezis C’ab bels digz jauzirai solatz.

Joy will surely appear to me when I seek from her For the love of God, this love from afar. And if it pleases her, I shall lodge Near her, although I am from afar. Then will appear fine discourse, When, distant lover, I shall be so close That with charming words I shall take delight in conversation.

V Ben tenc lo seignor per verai Per q’ieu veirai l’amor de loing, Mas per un ben qu m’en eschai N’ai dos mals, car tant m’es de loing Ai! car me fos lai peleris Si que mos fustz e mos tapis Fos pelz sieus bels huoills remiratz!

I consider that Lord as the true one Through whom I shall see this love from afar But for one good that befalls me from it, I have two ills, because she is so far. Ah! Would that I might be a pilgrim there So that my staff and my cloak Might be seen by her beautiful eyes.

VI Dieus qe fetz tot qant ve ni vai E fermet cest’ amor de loing Me don poder, qe-l cor eu n’ai, Q’en breu veia I’amor de loing Veraiamen en locs aizis, Si qe la cambra e-l jardis Me resemble totz temps palatz.

God who made all that comes and goes And established this love from afar Give me the power, for the desire I have, Quickly to see this love from afar, Truly, in agreeable places, So that chamber and garden Might always seemsto me a palace!

Technê of Radiance  109 VII Ver ditz qui m’apella lechai Ni desiran d’amor de loing, Car nuills autre jois tant no-m plai Cum jauzimens d’amor de loing; Mas so q’eu vuoill m’es tant ahis Q’enaissi-m fadet mos pairis Q’ieu ames e non fox amatz. Tornada Mas so q’ieu vuoill m’es tant ahis Toz sia mauditz lo pairis Qe-m fadet q’ieu non fos amatz!

He speaks the truth who calls me greedy And desirous of love from afar, For no other joy pleases me as much As enjoyment of love from afar; But what I want is so difficult For thus did my godfather decree my fate, That I should love and not be loved. But what I want is so difficult May the godfather be cursed Who decreed my fate that I should not be loved

Key Soprano—sung by live soprano Recorded Voice—recited in fixed-media

Soprano and recorded Voice—occurring live and in fixed-media Not audibly present—text does not occur

The electronic part of Lonh is indicated in the score by a separate staff ­ nderneath the vocal part. Example 5.1 cites measures 36–47 of the score, indiu cating both the vocal and electronics part for the end of the Prologue and the

Example 5.1  Lonh, mm. 36–47, end of Prologue to beginning of Section I.

110  Part II beginning of Section I. Descriptive terms such as “wind and whispering voices” and “non-pitched percussions” and notated rhythms in the electronic staff serve as cues to the soprano and indicate the timbral variety of the electronics part. Since the electronics part is not fully notated, I have mapped out its events. Table 5.3 lists the several timbral types occurring in Lohn. I have grouped these types into four categories: Vocal, Electronic, Nature, and Percussion. Within those large categories, the table shows the specific types, and abbreviations for specific types are given in an adjacent column. The categories of Vocal, Nature, and Percussion all entail sampled sounds; sometimes those samples have been manipulated and sometimes they have a strong resemblance to their sound source. The sounds of the Electronic category are recognizably synthetic. The percussion category has five subcategories— glockenspiel, vibraphone/ chimes, cymbal, gong, and drum—and timbral types within those subcategories. Since these are sampled and transformed percussion sounds, the timbral types sometimes merge into one another, as in the vibraphone/chimes. The Table 5.3  Electronics Part: Categories and Codes for Timbral Types. Categories of Timbral Types Vocal Choral—high Choral—mid-range Murmuring Voices: male+female Spoken Voice Electronic High—electric sound Nasal—electronic sound, mid-range Low—electronic sound Nature Birds—high Wind/rain Percussion Glockenspiel High Glock Low Glock Vib/Chimes Windchime Vib/Chime—softer mallet Vib/Chime—harder mallet Bell—sustained Cymbal Cymbal—hit with metal Cymbal—hit with wood Cymbal—bowed Gong Gong—hit with wood Gong—hit with soft mallet Drum Bass Drum

Code VOCL C-H C-M Mur Spkn ELCT E-H E-Na E-L NATR Brd W/R PERC Gl-H Gl-L WCh VCS VCH BLL CyM CyW CyB GgW GgS BsD

Technê of Radiance  111 descriptive names of the timbral types mostly refer to recognizable timbres of the sampled acoustic sounds. Sounds in the Electronic category are referenced by relative pitch and a sound feature, such as “nasal.” Figure 5.2 maps the occurrence of timbral types within the sections of Lonh, using the categories, layout and abbreviations of Table 5.3. ­Transcribing only relative features of timing, each cell of the timbral map indicates whether a particular timbral type is present and the relative time of its occurrence. For instance, the Bird type occurs throughout all but the very end of Section I, and in Section II the white vertical lines indicate that the Bird sounds are intermittent. For all of the timbral types except two I have indicated their occurrence with rectangles at the relative moments within each section. The two exceptions are the High and Low Glockenspiel timbral types. Here, because of the nature of the attacks of these types and their layering during sections V and VII, I have depicted their occurrences with small circles. The timbral mapping of Figure 5.2 provides the basis for my analysis of the musical strategies of the electronics part and for the soprano and electronics parts together. As a comprehensive formal property of Lonh, radiance emerges from the interaction of several coincident musical planes. These planes comprise three types of musical phenomena: 1) moments of sonic luminance, a quality arising from pitch range, spectral attributes, and culturally derived timbral associations, 2) moments of formal “flickering,” an emergent quality arising from musical processes of association and uniqueness, and 3) moments of intensity arising from the culmination of transformational process. My analysis takes the following path through these musical planes. I consider how the planes of luminance and flickering operate first in the electronics part and then the vocal part; next I consider how intensity arises through the interaction of both parts; and finally I consider how the overall property of radiance emerges from the interaction of these three planes. Figure 5.3 maps the events involved in luminance and flickering in the electronics part. The bracketed rows for luminance indicate the time of seven events and the words associated with five of them. These events of luminance have some unique and momentary qualities giving them salience; these include brighter sounds with prominent upper partials, higher pitch, and a louder dynamic. Of the seven such moments all but two are associated with significant words that are shown in the Text row of the figure. For instance, “remembra-m” in Section I occurs as part of the phrase “I remember a love from afar” and the articulation of the word achieves luminance with increased activity of the Bird type at a high pitch. The other moments of luminance associated with text include the words joy (jois), God (Dieus), might (Fos), and love (amor)—all significant words for the theme of love from afar.10 The moments of luminance not associated with particular words occur at Time 3:12 at the beginning of Section II and at Time 13:11 bridging over section VII to the Tornada. This latter instance is unusual in that it involves both higher and lower pitches as well as a dynamic swell, creating a shwooshing gesture into the concluding section.

Figure 5.2  Timbral Mapping: Timbral Types by Section.

BsD

GgW GgS

CyB

CyW

CyM

BLL

V-H

WCh VCS

Gl-L

Gl-H

PERC

W/R

NTR Brd

E-L

E-Na

Spkn ELCT E-H

Mur

C-M

Vocal C-H

Prologue

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

Tornada

II

2:54

2:11

“Remembra-m”

I

1:20

3:12

III

IV

5:33 6:11

VI

9:29

8:03 8:16

9:42

10:49

“Parra Jois” “Fos” “Dieus fetz” “Amor”

V

8:06

Figure 5.3  Radiance: Moments of Luminance and Moments of Formal Flickering in the Electronics Part.

Bass Drum

CyM CyW

BLL

E-H E-Na E-L WCh

Moments of Formal Flickering: Unique Timbral

GgS

VCH

VCS

Glock-Low

Glock-High

Birds

Moments of Formal Flickering: Significant Timbral Recurrences

Times:

Text:

Moments of Luminance

Prologue

0:00

VII

11:53

13:11

Tornada

13:15

114  Part II Moments of formal flickering arise from processes involving crosssectional associations generated by timbral recurrence and from salience generated by timbral uniqueness. Because the timbral associations arising from recurrence and moments of timbral salience are intermittent during Lonh, I refer to the emergent formal quality as flickering. The recognition of timbral recurrence across sections creates associations that generate such intermittent moments of formal “brightness.” The emergence of such formal flickering is a relational phenomenon in contrast to the quality of luminance. In  ­Figure 5.3 the middle, bracketed rows show significant timbral recurrences in the electronics part: Birds, Glockenspiel—High and Low, Vib/ Chime with softer and harder mallet, and Gong with soft mallet. The Bird type occurs at the beginning of Lonh (end of Prologue and Sections I and II) and recurs in the Tornada, creating associational relations across those sections. The significant occurrences of both the High and Low Glockenspiel type happen in sections IV–V and VII; and the significant occurrences of the Soft and Hard Vib/Chime type associate sections III, IV, and VI. And finally the Soft Mallet Gong type occurs in all but three of the sections and noticeably not in the last two sections. The directional arrows between these timbral types indicate the associational relations between these recurrences, and it is these associational relations between timbral recurrences that generate the sense of formal flickering. Unique timbral events generate another dimension of formal flickering. The lower bracketed rows of Figure 5.3 show the timbral types that occur either once or a few times in close succession. For instance, the Bass Drum type occurs only in the Prologue and the Cymbal with wood only in ­Section III.11 The Nasal Electronic type occurs three times in Section IV and the Sustained Bell in Section VI and toward the end of Section VII. Because they appear as unique (or nearly unique), these timbral events assume a salience that contributes to formal flickering. The sense of uniqueness is, however, a comparative feature of timbral quality and hence it depends not on a p ­ articular quality as does luminance nor on the associational ­relations arising from timbral recurrence. Rather timbral uniqueness generates ­ salience as a quality in relation to other timbral types. Overall, the mapping of Figure 5.3 coordinates the moments of luminance with the two modes of formal flickering for the electronics part, showing how timbral phenomena play a structuring role in Lonh. Next I turn to the vocal melody and its participation in formal flickering through associational relations. As mentioned earlier, Saariaho uses not only the text of Jaufré’s song but also the melody as a modal jumping-off place. Example 5.2 juxtaposes the melodic pitches of Saariaho’s Section I, which sets the first stanza of the poetry, with one of the extant versions of Jaufré’s melody—one that is at the Bibliotèque nationale in Paris. Comparison of Jaufré’s melody to Saariaho’s shows that she composes a melody that enacts a modal character, especially in lines one through five, by maintaining in general ways the range and intervallic contours of Jaufré’s melody. While

Technê of Radiance  115

Example 5.2  Comparison of Melodic Contours: Saariaho and Jaufré.

Example 5.3  Melodic Structuring of Soprano Part by Section: Range, First and Last notes, Modal Collections.

the first section of Lonh stays relatively close to the character of Jaufré’s song, the following sections do not. Example 5.3 abstracts general aspects of melodic structuring for each section of Lonh, indicating range, first and last note, and the modal collection. Some of the significant structuring features of Saariaho’s melody for each section are tabulated in Table 5.4, extrapolating from information given in Example 5.3. The table shows the first and last note of the melody in each section, indicates the modal orientation and its stability, and the range of the melody for each section. The table also indicates associational relations in the pitch organization of the soprano melody. Sections I, IV, VI, and the

By semitones

Range: pitches

Stability

Modal Collect

Last Note

First Note

Prologue

E4-F5

13

Stable

Stable

D4-D5

12

D

D

E4

D4

F4

II

I

E4

IV

A

Smallest

GҒ4- GҒ4-Aȸ5 F5 12 9

Stable Changing

A

A4 D5 E5

III

G4

CҒ5

D4

VI

E4-A5 17

E4-E5 12

CҒ? (Only 4 No Center pitches) Constrained Changing

E5

V

Table 5.4  Soprano Melody: Beginning and Ending Pitches, Modal Stability, Range, and Highest Notes.

B4

B5

Largest

19

D4-A5

Stable

A or D

D4

Tornada

Highest Soprano Pitch

14

A4-B5

Stable

No Center

A4

VII

A5

Technê of Radiance  117 Tornada all start on a D, sections II and V begin on E, and II and VII start on A. The associational arcs (with differing line characteristics for each of the three pitches) show these relations between sections. The recurrence of D as a section-beginning pitch suggest an overall D modal orientation for Lonh, an orientation supported by the dominant A, and its dominant E, as sectionbeginning pitches. In distinction to the more stable character of the sectionbeginning pitches, the section-ending pitches are more varied and serve to create a fluid pitch organization overall. As indicated in Table 5.4, Sections II and III both end on an E and Sections VI And VII on a B. S­ ections I, IV, and V end on F, G, and C♯, and the piece ends with an A in the vocal melody. This tension between more stable and fluctuating pitch organization characterizes the modal orientations of Lonh’s sections. Table 5.4 also shows that sections I through III have relatively stable modal collections, sections IV–VI relatively unstable, and Sections VII and Tornada return to stability although the modal center is unclear in the Tornada. The table also indicates that the smallest range occurs in Section III, the largest range in the Tornada, and the highest note, B5, in Section VII. Overall, the directed associational arcs on Table 5.4 suggest how the complex of relations for pitch organization contributes to the property of formal flickering in the vocal part. These moments of association create glimmers of connectivity and differing that play a role in this sense of flickering during Lonh. Next I turn to the third type of musical phenomena contributing to radiance—transformational processes culminating in moments of intensity. In this instance, I’ll focus on motivic transformations in the soprano ­melody. Two distinct but related motives play a role in this transformational process. Example 5.4 shows the “de loing” (afar) motive which concludes the phrase setting the text “A love from afar” (mm. 56–60). The example cites the significant occurrences of this motive and its transformations in ­sections I and II. Each occurrence of the motive is shown with its characteristic rhythm and the successive intervals are listed directly under the staff. As Example 5.4 indicates, three different transformations operate. The first transformation

Example 5.4  “de loing” Motive: Statement and Transformations.

118  Part II

Example 5.5  “Dieu Plat/Parra Jois” motive and transformations. (a)  Section III, “Dieu Platz” (“Pleases God”) (b)  Section IV, “Parra Jois” (“Joy will surely appear to me”)

(mm. 59–60 to 70–71) is expand-then-repeat-first-interval: that is, interval +3 becomes +5, and that +5 is repeated at the end. The next transformation is an interval retrograde: +3-1 becomes -1+3, and the last transformation is an interval expansion: -1+3 becomes -2+4. The second significant motive, “Dieu platz” (“pleases God”), is shown in Example 5.5a. The motive first occurs at the end of Section III (in m. 195) and then recurs in several transformations in Section IV, setting the text “parra jois” within the larger phrase “Joy will surely appear to me.” E ­ xample 5.5b cites the several transformations occurring in Section IV and annotates the transformations from Sections III to IV and within Section IV. Each ­subsequent motive transforms the one immediately preceding it rather than transforming the initial “Dieu Platz” motive, creating a chain of ­transformations. And as

Technê of Radiance  119 such, in Section IV the motive more properly becomes the “parra jois” motive. Throughout Section IV, the types of transformations vary from one to the next, creating a supple flow of relations. The process of transformation from the first “Dieu platz” motive culminates with four nearly identical c­ oncluding statements of the “parra jois” motive. Of the four, the first two starting in mm. 250 and 266 are identical, and those s­ tarting in mm. 272 and 275 are nearly identical, these last two differing from the first two only by a permutation of the last two notes. Overall then, the process of transformations of the “Dieu platz/parra jois” motive culminates in repetitions that create a moment of intensity at the end of Section IV, a culminating intensity that contributes to the long-range formal design of radiance. Finally, the last stage of my analysis demonstrates how the interacting planes of luminance, flickering, and intensity produce the overall property of radiance. Figure 5.4 represents the momentary, associational, and processive relations that occur during the planes of luminance, flickering, and intensity. For this figure, I use different shapes to indicate associations or significant moments and to suggest some coincident moments of particular prominence during Lonh’s structuring of musical time. In the luminance plane, the ovals indicate the proximity of luminant moments for those occurring in Sections I and II and those spanning Sections IV through VI, and the oval around the event going into the Tornada singles out its unique role in this plane. For the flickering plane rectangles indicate the associational relations or the unique relational events that contribute to formal flickering. For the intensity plane, directed arrows and hexagons indicate the transformation process for the “de  loing” and “Dieu platz/Parra jois” motives, a process whose culumination generates a moment of intensity for the ending of Section IV. As ­Figure 5.4 suggests, Lonh’s formal design arises from a complex network of events occurring during the three interacting planes of luminance, flickering, and intensity, and it is the interactions of these planes that project an overall sense of radiance. There are, however, some musical moments having more salience due to the confluence of events in interacting planes. These moments are indicated by diamond shapes at the bottom of Figure 5.4. The first confluence occurs at the end of section IV, its salience generated by i) the culminating intensity of the motivic transformation; ii) a moment of luminance; and iii) the unique nasal timbre. The second confluence occurs at the beginning of Section VI, its salience generated by i) the proximity of four moments of luminance; ii) the uniqueness of the Windchime and Bell timbral types; and iii) the recurrence of the the Vib/Chime—harder mallet timbral type. The third confluence occurs during the passage from Section VII to the Tornada, and it emerges from i) the moment of luminance during this passage; ii) the recurrence of the Bird timbral type; and iii) the highest note in the vocal part followed by the largest vocal range. These moments of formal salience during Lonh emerge from the multiple processes and relations of the coinciding planes. It is from the

F L I C K E R I N G

Timbral Recurrence

Unique Timbral Events

Range by Semitone Intensity:

Mod.Coll.

Last Note

First Note

Bass Drum

CyM

E-H E-Na E-L WCh BLL

VCH GgS

Glock-Low VCS

Gl-H

Brd

Luminance

Prologue

0:00

“du’n amor de loing”

“de loing”

D Stable

13

F4

E4

II

2:54

12

D Stable

D4

I

1:20

E4

D5

A4

9 Sm12 allest

G4

CҒ5

D4

VI

9:29

B4

A4

VII

11:53

D4

Tornada

13:15

12

17

14

st 19 Large

B5 Highest Pitch CҒ? (only 4) No Center, Changing No Center, A or D? Stable Stable

E5

V

8:06

“Parra jois”

A A Changing Stable

E5

IV

III

5:33 6:11

“D ieu Pla tz”

Soprano Melody

Figure 5.4  Interacting Planes—Luminance, Formal Flickering—and Moments of Salience. A5

Technê of Radiance  121 interactions of the three planes that these moments of salience assume their ­significance—a salience given only in relation to the features of luminance, flickering, and intensity. That is to say, these moments of formal salience are not the goal of the processes of interaction but rather they materialize as enhanced moments of radiance. From the very details of its sonic design, Lonh reveals the quality of ­radiance—its sense of sonic light and brightness emerging through its material details. The technê of Lonh then is a revealing of this lived experience of radiance. Let me conclude with one final observation: the radiance that Lonh sonically brings forth is itself an emergent feature of late twentieth century sound technologies—that is, the music-formal features of radiance are steeped in the digital sound technologies that both enhance and transform live and recorded sound. But despite her compositional dependence on these technologies, Saariaho has chosen to mask this mediation. Using digital technologies as a tool to enact a sonic design of radiance, Saariaho projects a premodern sense of longing as might have befit Jaufré in the twelfth century but a Jaufré embodied in the present through the female voice. ­Saaraiaho’s subtle maskings of the high degree of technological manipulation and of the gender inversion of the singing voice give the sheer beauty of Lonh a critical edge. notes 1. Heidegger’s concept of technology has proven fruitful for more recent philosophers of technology. They rely on the concept of technê in particular as part of a larger two-part argument. On one hand, they deny the idea of technology as a neutral tool that is put to use by humans, a concept made explicit by the NRA phrase “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” And on the other hand, they deny what Latour calls “the Autonomous Destiny that no human can master” attitude toward technology. The concept of technê models a more complex human-technology relation (famously articulated as the cyborg by Donna ­Haraway). See Haraway 1991; Ihde 2002, 1990, 1993; Latour 1993; and ­Verbeek 2005 in particular. 2. The phrase “sounding presence” does not refer to some transcendental notion of sound as an absolute existent but rather invokes what Ihde has described as both the “micro- and macroperceptions” of experience—bodily dimension of sensory perception and the cultural dimensions of perception. 3. My analytical inquiry focused on the audio recording with soprano Dawn Upshaw (Upshaw 1997) and also on some YouTube videos (see the references in the Works Cited list at the end of this chapter). I was unable to hear a live performance. 4. IRCAM, Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, is a French institute for research into music, especially electro-acoustic music. It was started by Pierre Boulez with support of the French government. 5. The score provides technical details pertaining to the fixed-media CD and how to set up the microphones of the voice for purposes of balance and reverberation. 6. In his analysis of Jaufré’s song, Leo Treitler indicates that there are three sources for the song in the Bibliothèque nationale: “MS 22543, known as R; MS 844 known as W; and MS 20050, known as X” (Treitler 1992, 10, fn.14).

122  Part II 7. The tornada is a short closing stanza in lyric poetry of Provence. For further information on lyrical form see Aubrey 1996. 8. It is believed that Jaufré heard about the beautiful Countess of Tripoli and that he died on his way to see her. Interested readers may view the illustrated manuscript of Jaufré and the Countess online: see Anonymous 2014. The theme of “love from afar” was an important Romantic trope of nineteenth century literature, and is manifest in Beethoven’s song cycle “An die ferne Geliebte.” 9. Moisala cites Saariaho’s sketches for Lonh in Moisala 2009. And the sketches show somewhat different durations for the sections. Given the strong creative relation between Upshaw and Saariaho, it seems clear that the timing differences between the sketches and that of the recorded performance have compositional intention. Dawn Upshaw premiered Lonh in 1996, and Saariaho had her in mind for other works from this period, including the opera L’Amour de Loin (2000) and Chateau de l’Âme for soprano and orchestra (1996). 10. The term “might” here is part of a conditional construction expressing the wish of the lover to be near the beloved. 11. The Bass Drum type also underscores the textual theme of a “love from afar,” suggesting the processional aspects of the lover’s quest.

Works Cited Anonymous. 2014. Illustration of Jaufré Rudel and the Countess of Tripoli. 13th C ­ entury. Recueil des poésies des troubadours, contenant leurs vies. Paris, ­Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 854. Accessed October 25, 2014. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8419245d/f256.image Aubrey, Elizabeth. 1996. The Music of the Troubadours. Bloomington: Indiana ­University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Cymians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1993. Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002. Bodies in Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. ­Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Moisala, Pirkko. 2009. Kaija Saariaho. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Roubaud, Jacques. 1994. La Fleur Inverse: L’art des Troubadours. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Saariaho, Kaija. 1996. Lonh. London: Chester Music. Treitler, Leo. 1992. “Medieval Lyric.” In Music Before 1600, edited by Mark Everist, 1–13. Oxford: Blackwell Reference. Upshaw, Dawn. 1997. Lonh, Private Gardens. Helsinki: Ondine. CD. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on ­Technology, Agency, and Design. Translated by Robert P. Crease. University Park: P ­ ennsylvania State University Press.

6 Difference and Identity Sofia Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet (1987)1

Sofia Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet of 1987 begins by repeating the pitch G, either as G4 or a harmonic G5, in a free rhythm realized by the performers; Example 6.1 shows the opening six measures of the quartet.2 These repetitions of an identical pitch last for nearly the first minute of performance, creating a restricted musical identity.3 Listening instead to the differing timbres and articulations, this sameness withdraws. Successive events present distinct sonic qualities creating a musical flow of perpetual alteration, a flow of differing.

Example 6.1  Second String Quartet, Reh 1–2, mm. 1–6.

124  Part II Others have addressed the analytical issues of too much identity in repetitive music, proposing ways to observe long-range design within repetition.4 Here I turn attention toward the constant flow of differing as occurs in Gubaidulina’s quartet. As a prelude to the analysis, this chapter first considers the quartet’s musical differing in connection to the emergence of concepts of difference in philosophy during the middle years of the twentieth century, and second it links the quartet’s musical differing to the composer’s situation as a female in a male-dominated profession and as person who remarks on her multiethnic identity. Prelude Concepts of difference have been of central philosophical concern since the early years of the twentieth century. In structural linguistics, meaning was understood to arise from relational differences between linguistic elements.5 But this oppositional notion of meaning was the subject of critique for various post-structuralist philosophers in the years following World War II. For authors such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler, difference and differing become a central concern across a broad spectrum of philosophical thought.6 Amongst those authors, Gilles Deleuze has been central not only in advancing a philosophy of difference and but also in critiquing the role of identity in Western thought, both of which prove useful for approaching music. In his 1968 Difference and Repetition, Deleuze articulates a concept of “difference in itself” and “repetition for itself” (Deleuze 1994). His interest in difference follows, as Smith and Protevi point out, from the concern to seek not the “conditions for possible experience” as Kant did but rather to seek the “genesis of real experience … the experience of this concretely existing individual here and now” (Smith and Protevi 2013). This focus on real and hence specific experience has far-reaching consequences for Deleuze’s philosophy, as Smith and Protevi eloquently explain: “‘Difference in itself’ is difference that is freed from identities seen as metaphysically primary. Normally, difference is conceived of as an empirical relation between two terms, each of which has a prior identity of its own (‘x is different from y’). Deleuze inverts this priority: identity persists, but is now a something produced by a prior relation between differentials (dx rather than not-x)” (Smith and Protevi 2013). Identity then is resultant from—not prior to—differing: it is an emergent effect. Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and its attendant critique of identity open up two pathways toward Gubaidulina’s quartet—one historical and the other analytical. The historical proliferation of thought about difference and differing in the last half of the twentieth century both reflected changing world circumstances broadly conceived and was pivotal in shaping responses

Difference and Identity  125 to those circumstances. For a great many authors, one of the central issues was how difference and differing were devalued in the underlying logic of Western thought. In this logic, meaning is generated from the hierarchical opposition of terms, such as mind/body, male/female, and rational/irrational. The first term is the dominant identity, such that the other is “not-x” to use Smith and Protevi’s formulation. Critique of this logic of identity directed attention to difference as non-relational, to “pure difference.” The ramifications of this critique and the corresponding focus on difference were far-reaching and especially so for an emerging feminist philosophy. Amongst a whole range of significant authors developing a feminist reading of difference, Elizabeth Grosz notes in a 1994 article that a concept of non-relational difference offers “an escape from the systems of binary polarization” and the “structure of stable unities”7 (Grosz 1994, 207). The opening of Gubaidulina’s quartet resonates with the historical emergence of difference, engaging the concept in its sound-thinking. No longer the primary identity of a sound, the pitch G dissolves into differences of timbral and articulative fluctuations. The second pathway toward Gubaidulina’s quartet opened by Deleuze’s philosophy of difference is analytical. As opposed to identity, which relies on an unchanging essence, differing involves temporal passage and change. For Deleuze, repetition plays a central role in manifesting such passage. A repetition motivated by difference occurs over time and constitutes a “creative transformation of things” (Smith and Protevi 2013). Repetition then not only shows the defining uniqueness of events but also is a generative and creative force. This Deleuzian insistence on the generative temporality of difference and repetition suggests some productive paths for analysis. For instance, analytical attention may focus on how the differential relations between events generate new effects. Such a Deleuzian intertwining of difference and repetition must have been somewhere in Gubaidulina’s musical thinking when she composed her Second String Quartet. Her program note, much of which is quoted below, suggests that difference and repetition were indeed formative principles (the italics are mine): This was the first time in my life I set myself the task of realizing a certain musical problem of great importance to me personally, not in a large scale form but in a small scale one. In the course of many years my attention has been persistently drawn to an idea I call “Musical Symbolism.” This means that what appears as a symbol (i.e. a knitting together of things of different significance) is not some sound or other, nor yet a conglomeration of sounds, but the separate constituent elements of a musical instrument or the properties of those elements. Specifically in this particular

126  Part II context, the discourse springs from the difference between the means of extracting the normal sound from stringed instruments and the means by which harmonics can be made to sound. It is possible to consider the passage across this difference as a purely mundane acoustical phenomenon and to make no particular issue out of it. But it is just as possible to experience this phenomenon as a vital and essential transition from one state to another. And this is a highly specific aesthetic experience, the experience of a symbol. It is just such an experience which distinguishes between everyday time and true essential time, which distinguishes between existence and essence. And this modulation, this transition between the two, happens not through “depiction” nor through “expression” but through transformation or transfiguration by means of an instrumental symbol. For this transition actually happens on the very instrument. In its acoustic self. (Gubaidulina 2014) Gubaidulina set for herself the compositional problem of creating a musical discourse of the “small scale,” of the “transformation or transfiguration” of “separate constituent elements” that creates a “vital and essential transition from one state to another”—her terms and phrases suggesting an intertwining of sonic difference made manifest through temporal passage. A detailed analysis of the Quartet allows for a more deeply nuanced sense of how Gubaidulina musically thinks difference in this sense, but before delving into a material engagement with the sounds of the Quartet I return briefly to Deleuze once more, and specifically to his thinking about art. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze writes about the paintings of Bacon from a philosophical perspective (Deleuze 2003). As one of the three ways of “thinking world” along with philosophy and science, Deleuze maintains that the thinking of the artist consists of the material creation of a “monument”—or a work of art—that produces sensations.8 Thus, art thinks the world through its very materiality—through paint, sound, shape, etc. Further, Deleuze links the sensations of art to the underlying affective forces of the world, claiming that “music must render non-sonorous forces sonorous, and painting must render invisible forces visible” (Deleuze 2003, 48). My analysis of Gubaidulina’s Second Quartet follows from this general point: the sounding music of the Quartet renders sonorous the non-sonorous forces of difference through repetition. In other words, the Quartet is a sound-thinking of difference as musical sensation. That Gubaidulina confronted difference is obvious for a composer whose gender defies the historical norm in the Western classical tradition. But difference figured in other dimensions of her life as well during the time of

Difference and Identity  127 the Quartet’s composition. As a modern composer, she would have been expected to develop a unique compositional voice that would have distinguished her from others. And within the context of the musical avantgarde in the latter half of the twentieth century, originality was an essential defining feature for the successful composer. Further, in her personal life, Gubaidulina often drew attention to her multicultural heritage—she had a Tatar father and Russian mother—and to herself as a bridge between East and West.9 My analysis of the Quartet demonstrates how its music sonically thinks difference and in particular how its various forms of repetition engage differing. My claim is not that the Quartet’s music represents Gubaidulina’s difference as a composer who is female, or as a composer of the avant-garde, or as a consequence of the uniqueness of her compositional voice. Rather, I argue that the Quartet musically thinks difference, in Gubaidulina’s terms, through “transformations” of sonic “elements” which creates a “vital and essential transition from one state to another.” Repetition is crucial to enacting this sense of transitioning since its proliferation effectively dissolves the identity of thing repeated and allows difference to become sonically present as such.

Analyzing Difference The Quartet has two main parts and a concluding part, each carrying out a unique process. The analytical mapping of Figure 6.1 shows the three parts and labels the formal functions that each part enacts.10 I name each of the three parts according to their function: Part 1, Reaching Out and Tethering; Part 2, Reaching Up and Renewing, and Part 3, Affirmation. The processes of each part entail significant amounts of simple musical repetition that reveals difference. In the following, I explain in detail the functions of the parts, particularly as they are manifest in musical sounds, and demonstrate how the musical details of the Quartet “think” the forces of sonic differing.

Reaching Out and Tethering

0:00 Danish Quartet Timings Mm. 1 Reh. 1

g Reachin

Up and

g Renewin

3:49 45 Reh. 21

Figure 6.1  Overall Temporal Design of the Second String Quartet.

8:03 124 Reh. 36

8:48

128  Part II Part 1: Reaching Out and Tethering The Reaching Out and Tethering function of Part 1 arises from the “Reaching-Out” gestures, which move above and below a generalized pitch hub—a hub defined by G4—and the consequent tethering back to that hub (to G4 or a close pitch, with some exceptions). This effect is created by three types of events: 1) “Continuous-G” events—the continuous articulation of G4 played with one of two timbral types: harmonic non vibrato or ordinario vibrato; 2) “Inflections-of-G” events—inflections of G4 played with five timbral types (ordinario vibrato, harmonic sul ponticello, ordinario non vibrato, tremolo ordinario, and tremolo sul ponticello); and 3) “Reaching-Out” tremolo gestures in Violin 1 and Cello that move predominantly by half- or whole-step linear movements above and below G4.11 The function of Reaching Out and Tethering depends on the Continuous-G and Inflections-of-G types that establish the pitch hub from which the Reaching-Out gestures pull away and to which they tether back. The opening six measures cited in Example 6.1 show the beginning of the Continuous-G and Inflections-of-G types. The Reaching-Out gestures start at Rehearsal 5 and continue through the end of Part 1; Example 6.2 cites Rehearsals 5–9, the beginning of a process that concludes at the end of Part 1. The following discussion of Part 1 considers first its processes of differing and then its function of Reaching Out and Tethering. Each of the three types of events occurs in forms that maximize difference, either through their combination with the other types or through successive groupings. Figure 6.2, a mapping of events from the beginning through Rehearsal 3, demonstrates some features of the processes of differing in the opening of the quartet.12 The top layer of the figure shows the Continuous-G events, the next lower layer the Inflections-of-G, and the bottom layer indicates dynamics of the whole. The figure combines traditional notational signs along with icons that represent some sonic feature or quality of the musical elements that make up the types. In some instances, shades of black and shapes are used to suggest some sounding quality. For example, the black and grey ovals depict a short string event, the shadings indicating different timbral inflections. Dynamics are indicated with a scale from ppp through ff, using the typical performance indications for dynamics. The articulation of differing as a process arises from the distinctions occurring in two ways: 1) differing of succession—nearly constant timbral distinctions between events that emphasize succession and 2) blurry patterning—a coincident patterning with blurry boundaries that articulates differing across longer temporal spans. Both types of differing may be observed visually in Figure 6.2. The differing of successive elements during the passage arises largely because of the interaction between the Continuous-G and Inflections-of-G layers. The frequent changes of timbre

Example 6.2 Second String Quartet, “Reaching Out” gestures in Violin I and Cello, Reh 5–9, mm. 15–21.

Figure 6.2  Second String Quartet, Part 1, Modes of Differing in the Continuous G and Inflections of G Events.

Dynamics

Timbre

Ordinario vib.

Harmonic non vib. Ordinario vib.

f ff



f f f

< >

ff ff

1 3

mp

ppp



f f f

4

crescendo/decrescendo

ppp...pp...p...mp...mf...f...ff

Scale of Dynamics





2

ff ff

Long notes

Abbreviations of Timbral Types Harmonic non vibrato Harmonic non vib. Harmonic sul ponticello Harmonic s. p. Tremolo Ordinario non vibrato Ordinario non vib. semi-tonal inflection of G; Ordinario vibrato Ordinario vib. colors indicate differing Ordinario tremolo Tremolo ord. timbral inflections Sul ponticello tremolo Tremolo s. p.

Short notes

Upbow

Downbow

Key to Notation Inflections

b)

a)

f

Dynamic Groupings and Differences

ppp

Inflections of G

1

Continuous G

Tremolo ord. Tremolo s. p.

Harmonic s. p. Inflections of Ordinario non vib. G

Continuous G

Measures

Rehearsal 5

2

ff

Ordinario non vibrato

Ordinario vibrato Harmonic sul ponticello

Ordinario vibrato

9

rm

f f

ff



ff ff



f f f

10

3

Ordinario non vibrato

>

sfo Tran

8



< f p pp pp

7

Transform:



ff f f

6

<

f f f ff ff

11

>

Difference and Identity  131 do not simply inflect the constant presence of G4 but further they virtually dissolve the identity of that pitch, drawing attention to the timbral differing of succession. A similar process operates in the dynamics of the passage. The frequent changes and the relatively louder dynamics of the Inflections-of-G with respect to the Continuous-G layer draw attention to processes of dynamic differing. A score-like visual reading of Figure 6.2 can give some sense of the aural impression of the passage. Simultaneous with this flow of difference of timbres, articulations, and dynamics, a blurry patterning brings out processes of differing over larger spans of time. The patterning creates groupings that have blurry boundaries because of the nature of their constituents, qualitative distinctions between timbres and dynamics, and because of durational distinctions between groupings. Both the distinctions of timbral quality and of duration in the non-pulsed rhythmic context of the opening define not sharply delineated but rather indistinct boundaries. Some of the possible groupings of the passage are indicated in Figure 6.2 with circles and connecting dotted lines. I refer to such groupings by the number of elements they comprise; for instance, a group with two elements is a “duplet” and is indicated in Figure 6.2 with . In the Continuous-G layer, for example, the succession of the two timbral qualities, harmonic non vibrato + ordinario vibrato, creates a duplet that occurs twice during the passage. While the sense of duplet arises from a two-part pattern, the distinctions between each duplet allow the processes of differing to emerge within a longer temporal span.13 As Figure 6.2 indicates, such groupings occur frequently during the opening, establishing “triplets” and “quintuplets.” Another mode of differing occurs through a transformation of timbral succession, as for instance in the transformation of the quintuplets of mm. 2 and 4 into those of m. 10 (indicated by the dashed line and the label Transformation). This timbral transformation, schematized in the lower righthand box of Figure 6.2, involves a change of timbre for two elements—from ordinario vibrato to ordinario non vibrato—by way of a repeated triplet such that the first quintuplet becomes the second. Similar processes of differing occur by means of dynamic changes during the passage. As shown in the Dynamics layer of Figure 6.2, and specifically in the Inflections-of-G strand, differing dynamics create groupings with blurry boundaries. As shown in an additional pair of layers beneath the Inflections-of-G strand labeled Dynamic Groupings and Differences, these groupings themselves generate longer groupings. In the shorter layer of dynamic groupings (labeled a) the sequence of “loud-louder” (f-ff) occurs primarily in groupings of triplets or quintuplets, instances of such groupings occurring in mm. 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10. The quartet of m. 6 differs, however, with a sequence of “louder-loud-louder.” In the longer groupings of ­Dynamics (labeled b), a sequence of “loud-loud-softer” (which in this context ‘loud’ comprises f-ff and ‘softer’ comprises mp-ppp) occurs in the first two

132  Part II triplets. The last triplet transforms the “louder-softer” sequences of the previous triplets into an end emphasis on ff. While Figure 6.2 shows events through Rehearsal 3 only, it exemplifies the processes of Part 1 that continuously develop into new modes of differing with respect to successive events and the longer spans created by blurry patterning. The processes of differing, however, arise from the constant repetitions of G4, whose identity as this specific pitch becomes audibly transparent. As Example 6.2 shows, the tremolo lines of the Reaching-Out gestures always entail a pairing of Violin I and Cello and move predominantly by half- or whole-step above—with the occasional larger intervals that protrude from the line. For instance, at Rehearsal 5 the violin initiates an upward directed gesture that is mirrored by the cello shortly thereafter, each gesture reaching up or down by an interval of seven semitones only to be tethered back to G♯4 at its end. And at Rehearsal 8, the cello again answers the violin but now repeats the violin’s upward line, both “Reaching Out” slightly further by an interval of eight semitones. Part 1 consists of 13 instances of these paired Reaching-Out gestures, the occurrences schematized in Table 6.1. The columns indicate the number of notes; the starting and ending pitch for both violin and cello; the relation of the violin and cello gestures to each other (mirroring/matching of contour and coordinated/offset beginnings), and the intervallic span and ending pitch of each gesture. As Table 6.1 demonstrates, the succession of Reaching-Out gestures enacts a process of differing through constant variation. Over the course of the passage, the number of notes of successive gestures increases although not in a consistent way; the gestures are offset temporally until Rehearsal 16 when they begin together; after the initial alternation between mirrored and matching contours, the passage ends with mirroring of the last seven gestures (starting from Rehearsal 14); and the distance of the Reaching-Out constantly increases by one semitone from Rehearsals 11 through 18, after which the distance increases by five and three semitones. The intervallic shaping of the Reaching-Out gestures also enacts processes of differing, as Figure 6.3 indicates for the gestures of Rehearsals 5 and 8. At Rehearsal 5, the figure shows the mirroring relation between the violin and cello, and the annotations on the pitch intervals indicated underneath the staves show trichordal and pentachordal repetition and retrograde inversions for each of the instrumental lines. At Rehearsal 8, the figure shows the internal palindrome. The internal intervallic relations within and across the Reaching-Out gestures enact differing through the recurrences and transformation of subunits. Throughout Part 1, the Reaching-Out gestures enact not only processes of differing but also of intensification, due to the increase in the number of notes and the further distance from the pitch hub in successive gestures. The

Difference and Identity  133 Table 6.1  Second String Quartet, “Reaching Out” Gestures of Violin I and Cello. Rehearsal Number

Number of Notes

Starting Pitch

Ending Pitch Vl and Vc “Reaching Relation Out” Distance from G4

V1

Vc

V1

Vc

 5

13

G4

G4

G♯4

F♯4

 8

10

G4

G4

G4

G4

10

19

G4

G4

G4

G4

11

10

G4

G4

G4

G4

12

14

G4

G4

G4

G4

13

15

G4

G4

G4

G4

14

21

G4

G4

FS

A3

15

13

G5

G3

G♯4

F♯4

16

16

G4

G4

GS

G3

17

 8

G4

G4

G♯5

G♭3

18

13

G4

G4

B♭5

E3

19

21

G4

G4

D♯7

B2

20

29

F♯3

F7

A2

Mirror, Offset Same, Offset Mirror, Offset Mirror, Offset Same, Offset Same, Offset Mirror, Offset Mirror, Offset Mirror, Together Mirror, Together Mirror, Together Mirror, Together Mirror, Together

Semitones  7

Pitch

 8

E♭5

 8

E♭5

 8

E♭5

 9

E♭5

10

F5

11

F♯S

12

GS

13

G♯5

14

AS

15

B♭5

20

D♯6

23

F♯6

D5

totality of the effect of these processes of differing and intensification over Part 1 is mapped in Figure 6.4, which visually schematizes the overall function of Reaching Out and Tethering that manifests over Part 1.14 Time is depicted on the vertical axis with the beginning of the passage at the bottom of the figure, and register on the horizontal axis, with the hub of G4 as the middle column. The Inflections of G are shown as the horizontal “stitches” across the column, and the Reaching-Out gestures emanate out from the G4 hub according to their intervallic distance from it. The lines at the top of the G4 column are the meandering gestures by Violin II and Viola that conclude Part 1. The sense of tethering intensifies gradually over the course of the passage as the Reaching-Out gestures become more insistent, frequent, and

134  Part II

Figure 6.3  Second String Quartet, Intervallic Differing in the “Reaching Out” Gestures.

extensive. As the mapping of Figure 6.4 suggests, the continual processes of differing and intensification arise by means of the repetitions of the passage, the constant presence of G4, and the transformed recurrences of the Reaching-Out gestures. Danish Quartet Timings G2

G3

G4

G5

G6

4:00 3:40 3:20 3:00 2:40 2:20 2:00 1:40 1:20 1:00 40 20 Time

0

Figure 6.4  Second String Quartet, Part 1, Reaching Out and Tethering.

Difference and Identity  135 Part 2: Reaching Up and Renewing Part 2 of Gubaidulina’s Quartet has a function of Reaching Up and Renewing. This function is enacted by a “mosaic” design, consisting of three types of events whose recurrences articulate eight stages. These stages (discussed below in more detail) are marked off by a Reaching-Up gesture, a chromatic ascent that emerges from the mosaic, and a Renewing gesture that refreshes the process and progress of ascent and that also plays a role in the mosaic. The three types of events that comprise this mosaic design are defined as follows, and their first several occurrences are annotated on the score excerpt of Rehearsal 21 (mm. 44–50) given in Example 6.3: 1 “Sonority”—a continuous harmonic event consisting of two or more pitches. Sonorities involving pitch intervals (pi) of four or eight semitones and one or eleven semitones occur frequently, establishing an overall harmonic character for Part 2. 2 “Cry”—a falling or rising semitone melodic gesture of two elements that has a “cry” character. Often the Cry emerges from a Sonority event. 3 “Multidimensional pitch-interval 7” (or “Multi-7”)—a figure of vertical and successive pitch-interval 7s, sounding in four timbral types. The mosaic design of Part 2’s initial stage (Rehearsals 21–25, mm. 45–67) is suggested by the layout in Figure 6.5. All three types of events are introduced initially (mm. 45–51), but then the progressive variation of each type—entailing changes in pitch and register, timbre, texture, and duration, and their continuous recombination—creates a “mosaic-like” sequence for Part 2. The overall function of the part is characterized by two gestures that emerge from the mosaic events. The Reaching-Up gesture is characterized by chromatic ascent and occurs several times during Part 2. As shown by the bold pitch names in Figure 6.5, the first Reaching-Up gesture begins with the A4 in m. 58, occurring in both the Sonority and Cry events, and rises chromatically to an F♯5 in m. 67. Since the notes of the ReachingUp gesture play a role in mosaic events, it effectively emerges from the mosaic design, largely because of the force of the rising chromatic line. The Renewing gesture (not shown in Fig. 6.5) consists of a dyad of either interval class 3 or 4, which because of either dynamic or textural emphasis has the effect of renewing the overall ascent at various moments throughout Part 2. This gesture is an element of the Sonority events, but because of its musical emphasis, it takes on an added role—that of reinitiating upward passage. As noted above, the overall Reaching Up and Renewing function of Part 2 is enacted through eight stages. Each stage begins with a Renewing gesture, and all but two also entail occurrences of the Reaching-Up gesture.

136  Part II

Example 6.3 Second String Quartet, Part 2, Reh 21, mm. 44–50, Reaching Up and Renewing, Three Event-types of the Mosaic Design.

As Figure 6.6 indicates, the upward trajectory of this passage spans three octaves from A4 through A7, but the upward ascent is not smooth—it stalls in Stages 2 and 4, and is steeper in some stages (“steeper” being a function of time and size of interval). The Renewing gestures, also indicated in Figure 6.6, mark the beginning of each stage of the trajectory, renewing afresh the sense of progress upward. For instance, as the score excerpts of Example 6.4 show, the Renewing gesture of Stage 2 (m. 67) is set off by texture and dynamics, and the gesture of Stage 5 (m. 86) is set off by texture, register, and the vibrato in viola and cello and the dynamic swells in the violins. It is noteworthy that the Renewing gestures initiate an upward chromatic ascent for each stage with two exceptions: Stages 2 and 4. The

GҒ A

A-B A-GҒ

B F

B A

A-B

GҒ

23 57

A-B

A B A

58 A-B

FҒ-CҒ-FҒ CҒ FҒ B--FҒ-B A-E-B-E-A E-B-FҒ D-A-E-A-D A-E-B A-E-B-E- B-A-E-B B - E D-A-E-A E-D-A-E

B GҒ B GҒ A A A A

56

B A B A

CҒ A

CҒ A

62 CҒ

B A B B-C A A

61 C-CҒ

A-E-A-D-G D-A-E D-A-D-G-C G-D-A

A-B

B A B B-C A A

CҒ A

24 59 60 A-B -B B-C

CҒ

A

E-B-FҒ A-E-B

FҒ D

25 66 67 E-F FҒ

F F E E D-DҒ-E E A

F A

64 65 CҒ-D-DҒ-E E-F

B-C / D-DҒ D-DҒ-E A........... A........

C-CҒ A

63 CҒ-D-DҒ

Figure 6.5  Second String Quartet, Part 2, Reh 22–25, mm. 45–67, Reaching Up and Renewing, Mosaic Design.

*includes compound intervals

–1 FҒ-F Multi-7 (simultaneous and successive pitch-interval 7s) arco Harmonic A-E-B-E-A E-B-FҒ pizzicato D-A-E-A-D A-E-B Harmonic tremolo Pizzicato

Other pi

Pi 1 or 11

GҒ A A D Cry (semitonal figure either up or down) +1

22 21 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 Measures 45 46 47 Reaching Up Gesture Sonority (two or more continuous sounds of the same or differing pitch-intervals) Pi 4 or 8* FҒ FҒ F A D D

Rehearsal

Reaching Up

3:54

Time: Danish

Initiating Interval

4

5

6

7

FҒ D

21

Octave

1

Stage

Rehearsal

22

23

24 25

( FDҒ(

5:05

2 26

27

D B

5:24

3 28 29

( FBҒ(

5:43

4

FҒ DҒ

6:03

5 30

Figure 6.6  Second String Quartet, Part 2, Reh 21–34, Stages of Reaching Up and Renewing.

Renewing

A C-CҒ

6:16

6 31

CҒ A

6:30

7

32

F A

6:58

8 33

34 (8:03)

Difference and Identity  139

Example 6.4 Second String Quartet, Part 2, mm. 65–67 and 86–87, “Renewing” gestures.

Renewing gestures have the effect of restarting the ascent but in these two stages the ascent stalls. The interactions of the mosaic events and Reaching-Up/Renewing gestures enact the overall function of Reaching Up and Renewing. Tracing these interactions in an abbreviated form, Figure 6.7 maps their occurrences in order to suggest how the function emerges from the events and gestures. As the figure suggests, each stage and each occurrence of the events and gestures differs from the one preceding, such that an overall process of differing characterizes the upward trajectory of the passage. Or in other words, the repetitions of the chromatic ascent and of its renewal allow the process of differing to become salient.

Stages

Reaching Up Renewing

7 6 5 4

1

A...FҒ D...B

FҒ-F

A-GҒ/A B

A....CҒ A....FҒ D....B D....B

F A

2

G B

A....D D....G

FҒ-F

FҒ D

3

Db-D

D B

E D

4

6

A-B

A A DҒ C

FҒ-G

DҒ FҒ CҒ DҒ

B..GҒ/A E...CҒ/D

FҒ-F

E FҒ

5

Figure 6.7  Second String Quartet, Part 2, Reaching up and Renewing: Processes of Differing.

Mosaic Events

*Highest and lowest pitches at beginning and end of each stage.

Multi-7*

Cry

Sonarity* FҒ D

Octave CҒ E

7

C C E A CҒ A E DҒ; CҒC

8

FҒ-F; D-CҒ

A FҒ

Difference and Identity  141 Part 3: Affirmation The Affirmation function of the concluding part (Rehearsal 36, mm. 123–36) is enacted by the alternation of two related sonorities that “affirm” processes of the previous parts. This function projects a sense not of temporal becoming, but rather of stillness that dissipates the more forward-directed motion of the preceding parts. As in Parts 1 and 2, however, differing emerges from repetition, in this case the repetition of two sonorities with sonic features that are “Diffuse” and “Focused.” As shown in the annotated score excerpt of Example 6.5 (mm. 123–26), the Diffuse sonority consists of larger intervals and a wider range, and the Focused sonority of smaller intervals and a smaller range. A map of the occurrences of the Diffuse and Focused sonorities in Figure 6.8a shows that the Diffuse sonority spans 65 semitones and its harmonic intervals are relatively large, especially in the lower register. The Focused sonority, by contrast, spans only 18 semitones, its constituent intervals are smaller, and its pc set is a subset of that of the Diffuse sonority.

Example 6.5 Second String Quartet, Part 3, Reh. 36, mm. 123–26, Affirmation, Alternating Sonorities.

142  Part II PC Sets Diffuse: Focused:

(a) Alternation of Diffuse and Focused Senorities GҒ7 CҒ7

1 7 4

Diffuse

24

6 Focused

E 2

16

GҒ5 D5 CҒ5 FҒ4 D4

Diffuse

D3

3

Focused

D5

4 Diffuse

FҒ6

7

18 Semitones

65 Semitones

A6

(012578) (0157)

11

Reh. 36 M. 123

132

(b) Durational Differing Duration by beat

5

3

6

8 Dynamics

p

3

3

9 f

p

15

7 10

f

p

f

f pp

Figure 6.8 (a) Second String Quartet, Part 3, Reh. 36, mm. 123–36, (b) Affirmation, Durational Differing.

The alternation of the Diffuse and Focused sonorities manifests difference not through the inflections of G4 during Part 1, nor as in Part 2 through the progressive changes of successive events and their recombination in mosaic design. Rather, differing in Part 3 arises primarily from changes in the duration of the two sonorities (varying from 3 to 15 beats), with some distinction in dynamics as well. As Figure 6.8b indicates, the Focused sonority always has a forte dynamic and the Diffuse sonority a piano→forte dynamic, with the exception of its last occurrence which is played pianissimo. A grouping of the sonorities into “Diffuse-Focused” pairs demonstrates a blurry patterning that enacts a progressive differentiation. Figure 6.8b also illustrates how the pairings show a reversal of the long/short pattern in the third pair, an increase by one beat of the longer duration of each pair, and an overall increase by one beat of the succession of pairs. The duration of the final Diffuse sonority, as if in response to the reversal of the third pair, is significantly longer at 15 beats. While the final occurrence of the Diffuse sonority has a greater durational and dynamic difference with respect to the preceding sonorities, the distinctions between events in the Affirmation passage are finely drawn. The subtleties of the distinctions both allow the differences of the repetitions to become manifest, and the final, more distinct statement of the Diffuse sonority to provide an ending to the passage and to the Quartet.

Difference and Identity  143 The Affirmation function of Part 3 arises from features of the Diffuse and Focused sonorities that “affirm” earlier events of the piece through allusion or repetition. The two sonorities comprise pitch classes and registers that have played significant roles in the preceding two parts. In particular, G♯ is prominent as the highest pitch of both the Diffuse and Focused sonorities. In place of G, which played such a crucial role in Part 1, G♯ now reaches up from that tethering pitch into a higher pitch place, and its manifestation as G♯7 affirms the Reaching Up process of Part 2 which, before the wafting up in Violin I, rested momentarily on G7. The doubling of D in different octaves in both sonorities also affirms the important role of that pitch class in Part 2, and particularly its role in the D-F♯ sonority that occurs so prominently at the beginning of Part 2 in both the Renewing gestures and “Multi-7” events. Finally, in the most obvious sense, the Diffuse sonority affirms the Reaching Up and Renewing process of Part 2 with its high register and the airy breadth of its spacing. In perhaps a less obvious sense, the alternation of the Diffuse and Focused sonorities in this concluding passage affirms the Reaching Out and Tethering of Part 1: the Focused sonority tethers the registral reach of the Diffuse sonority. That the Quartet culminates with the registral reach and breadth of the Diffuse sonority suggests not that one process has triumphed over another, but rather that the alternation of sonorities—which in itself affirms multiple and different processes—ends with the one that allows space for the other. In other words, the Quartet ends with the sonority that manifests, in its totality, both difference and repetition. Coda As a composer who is female, Sofia Guibaidulina has had to encounter and negotiate difference in ways unique to her situation as a woman and her particular life circumstances. The Second String Quartet seems focused especially on difference as a lived reality, but not only or simply as a difference that leads to the binaries of exclusionary thought. Rather, through musical repetitions and changes in both short- and long-term temporal relations, Guibaidulina musically thinks difference in itself. Through the constantly varying events that combine and recombine in new ways, complex threads of association proliferate throughout the Quartet. The processes that run through these threads of association give shape to the repetitions and to the differences they reveal. While the Affirmation passage functionally ends the piece, it does so by opening up a sonic place for the Reaching Up and Renewing and the Reaching Out and Tethering processes to reverberate. If, as Gubaidulina suggests in her “Composer Note,” we hear in the Quartet the “vital and essential transition” from one sounding event to another, then we may begin to have a palpable sense of the difference—the “pure difference”—that the music thinks.

144  Part II notes 1. Another version of my analysis of Gubaidulina’s Second Quartet is published in Parsons and Ravenscroft 2015. 2. There are two available scores: one printed—Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet no. 2 (Hamburg: H. Sikorski, 2002)—and the other a facsimile reproduction of the manuscript (Hamburg: H. Sikorski, 1991). 3. When working on this analysis, I relied primarily on two recorded performances— by the Kronos and the Danish Quartets; I did not have access to recordings by the Arditti and Rubin Quartets. The Danish Quartet performance was the one that most closely affirmed my own analytical observations and I have used it for any timing indications. See Danish String Quartet 1994; Arditti String Quartet 1994; Kronos Quartet 1993; Rubin String Quartet 2006. 4. See Cohn 1992; Duker 2013; Epstein 1986; Quinn 2006; and Roeder 2003. Lloyd Whitesell makes a related argument about sameness in terms of whiteness in avant-garde music: See Whitesell 2001. 5. The classic authors in structuralist linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure, whose ideas were extended by Claude Lévi-Strauss into structural anthropology. For representative works see Saussure 1986 and Lévi-Strauss 1975; the latter was discussed in Chapter 2. 6. For relevant works of these authors see: Derrida 1978, Foucault 1994, Butler 1990 and 1993, and Irigaray 1985. 7. As a side note here it is worth pointing out that not all feminist writers were sympathetic to the philosophy of Deleuze in his work with Guattari (see 1983 especially). These critics included Jardine 1985 and Irigaray 1985. Other feminist philosophers sympathetic to the Deleuzian project, while not necessarily to all of his concepts, are Braidotti 1991 and 1994, Moira Gatens 1996, and Dorothea Olkowski 1999; see also the essays in Buchanan and Colebrook 2000. 8. Deleuze and Guattari also write about the three ways of thinking the world in Deleuze and Guattari 1994. I refer to this formulation of the idea in Chapter 4, see page 78. 9. Michael Kurtz details the various dimensions of Gubaidulina’s multicultural heritage and its role in shaping her artistic vision. See Kurtz 2007. 10. As an instance of another artistic mapping of the work see the visualization by Ji Yeon Lee, which is included in Parsons and Ravencroft 2015. 11. I indicate the function of parts in italics, as for instance in the Reaching Out and Tethering function of Part 1 and indicate specific gestures in quotations, as for instance in the “Reaching-Out” gesture. 12. Figures 6.2 and 6.4 were originally conceived with color. In the original version of Figure 6.2 I used color to indicate timbral differences, and Figure 6.4 continued the color depictions utilized in Figure 6.2. For the purposes of publication, these figures have been recast in shades of black. The original versions of these figures can be viewed at: www.judylochhead.com. 13. The careful reader and listener will note that in Figure 6.2 I have made some specific interpretations of timbral quality or dynamics that are ambiguous in the score. My interpretations are like the ones that performers would make in performing the work. For instance, in the cello part of m. 10, the first G4

Difference and Identity  145 is marked ord. and downbow at f. I have interpreted this as non vibrato since earlier instances of a related figure clearly show ord. vibrato. 14. The original color version of this map is available at www.judylochhead.com.

Works Cited Arditti String Quartet 1994 [1990]. Gubaidulina’s String Quartet no. 2. On Kurtag, Lutoslawski, Gubaidulina. Montaigne Auvidis MO. CD. Braidotti, Rosi. 1991. Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy. New York: Routledge. ———. 1994. “Toward a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzian Tracks; or, Metaphysics and Metabolism.” In Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, edited by Constantin Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, 159–85. New York: Routledge. Buchanan, Ian, and Claire Colebrook, eds. 2000. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. ———. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge. Cohn, Richard. 1992. “Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class Sets in Steve Reich’s Phase-Shifting Music.” Perspectives of New Music 30/2: 146–177. Danish String Quartet. 1994. Gubaidulina’s String Quartet no. 2. On Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartets 1–3. Classic Produktion Osnabrück. CD. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994 [1968]. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press. ———. 2003 [1981]. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1983[1977]. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———.1994. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978 [1967]. Writing and Difference. Translated and with an introduction by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duker, Philip. 2013. “Resulting Patterns, Palimpsests, and ‘Pointing Out’ the Role of the Listener in Reich’s Drumming,” Perspectives of New Music 51/2: pp. 141–192. Epstein, Paul. 1986. “Pattern Structure and Process in Steve Reich’s Piano Phase.” Musical Quarterly 72/4: 494–502. Foucault, Michel. 1994 [1966]. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books. Gatens, Moira. 1996. “Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power.” In Deleuze: A Critical Reader, edited by Paul Patton, 162–187. Oxford: Blackwell. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics.” In Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, edited by Constantin Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, 187–210. New York: Routledge. Gubaidulina, Sofia. 2014. “Composer Note.” Schirmer Music Sales Classical. Accessed November 15, 2014. http://www.schirmer.com/default.aspx?TabId=24 20&State_2874=2&workId_2874=24110.

146  Part II Gubaidulina, Sofia. 2002. String Quartet no. 2. Hamburg: H. Sikorski. ———. 1991. String Quartet no. 2. Manuscript Facsimile. Hamburg: H. Sikorski. Irigaray, Luce. 1985 [1977]. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jardine, Alice A. 1985. Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell Univeristy Press. Kronos Quartet. 1993. Gubaidulina’s String Quartet no. 2. On Short Stories. Nonesuch. CD. Kurtz, Michael. 2007. Sofia Gubaidulina: A Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1975 [1964]. The Raw and the Cooked. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row. Olkowski, Dorothea. 1999. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Parsons, Laurel, and Brenda Ravenscroft, eds. 2015. Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music from 1960–2000. New York: Oxford University Press. Quinn, Ian. 2006. “Minimal Challenges: Process Music and the Uses of Formalist Analysis.” Contemporary Music Review 25/3: 283–94. Roeder, John. 2003. “Beat-class modulation in Steve Reich’s music.” Music Theory Spectrum, 25/2): 275–304. Rubin String Quartet. 2006 [1998]. Gubaidulina’s String Quartet no. 2. On 20th Century String Quartets. Rubin String Quartet. Arte Nova. CD. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1986 [1983]. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger. Translated and annotated by Roy Harris. LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Smith, Daniel, and John Protevi. 2013. “Gilles Deleuze.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition). Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed October 25, 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/deleuze/. Whitesell, Lloyd. 2001. “White Noise: Race and Erasure in the Cultural Avant– Garde.” American Music 19/2: 168–189.

7 Incessance of Memory Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet no. 2, Demons and Angels (2004–05)

Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet No. 2 (2005), subtitled “Demons and Angels,” presents a music-story—that is, a story of music.1 Garrop describes its broad outlines in her program notes: the quartet “tells the story of a man who thought his actions were guided by the forces of good, only to discover that he has lost his mind and wreaked havoc on earth” (Garrop 2005). This is a story not of plot and motivation but rather of the psychological feelings associated with the changing beliefs of the man who is the focus of the story. The sequential components of the story have to do with the man’s changing awareness of the motivations of his actions and the psychological and physical consequences of those actions. Garrop writes: “The first two movements explore the man’s personality.” —demonic spirits in the first and angels in the second. The third movement, subtitled “Inner Demons,” “depicts the man as he loses his mind” and the fourth his “fleeting thoughts [as they] alternate between chaos and the hope of finding redemption” (Garrop 2005). In Garrop’s conception, the music-story of the second quartet operates in the mythic realm, serving as an allegory for humanity in the twenty-first century. The man’s identity as a positive force is eventually revealed as a delusion of madness, setting the angelic against the demonic. Good suddenly turns to bad with tragic consequences. The angelic and the demonic vacillate obsessively in the man’s memory, an incessant vacillation into madness. Here I will approach the music-story of the third movement of the quartet from a perspective somewhat different from the one that Garrop provides— not to contradict her but to explore a diverse pathway into the music. My focus is on how the music thinks obsessively through cultural memory. In other words, the music of the third movement presents incessant memories that through their cultural resonances enact a kind of music-story of an obsessive mental vacillation of our time. The musical things of the movement include two dance-like melodic figures, three gestural figures, a transitional figure, and a quotation of the folk tune “I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” Example 7.1 cites the beginning of the two melodic figures and the folk tune. The example also labels different parts of the melodic figures and folk tune, and the roles of these parts are addressed in the following discussion. Figure 7.1 is a map showing the large sectional groupings of the movement.2 A key in the bottom lefthand corner of Figure 7.1 indicates the abbreviations for the melodic and gestural figures and folk tune,

Example 7.1 Tarantella and Waltz Dance-like figures and the “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” tune. a) Tarantella b) Waltz c) “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” tune

Incessance of Memory  149 abbreviations also used in Example 7.1. The dance-like figures include music alluding to a tarantella (T, see Example 7.1a) and a waltz (W,  see Example 7.1b). The Tarantella figure is in a fast compound duple meter that evokes a frenzied, whirling dance, and the Waltz figure is in a slower, more stately triple meter.3 The transition music—which I refer to as “Passing” (P) since it passes from the Tarantella section to the “Wayfaring Stranger” section—reasserts the triple meter first occurring with the waltz. The “Wayfaring Stranger” folk tune continues the triple meter (See Example 7.1c).4 The three gestural figures are a Falling gesture (F), a Rising gesture (R), and Chaos gesture (C). The Falling and Rising gestures have a relatively long duration and involve glissandi or detuning. The Chaos gesture, on the other hand, is more of an outburst of frenetic activity, whose precise details are left to the performers. These musical things are repeated, transformed, fragmented, distorted, and combined variously over the course of the movement, creating a flow of incessantly recurring memories. Figure 7.1 maps out in general terms these recurrent figures, tune, and gestures. The grouping arcs show three sections: Agitated Dancing, Nostalgic Remembering, and Obsessing. The music of these sections invokes various music-cultural memories through the tarantella and waltz allusions and “Wayfaring Stranger” quotations. Eventually through their interactions, fragmentations, and transformations, these musical allusions and quotations lose their memorial resonance and become obsessive fragments for “Inner Demons’” music-story. Agitated Dancing: Tarantella and Waltz

T Secs.

W

T

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:55

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Nostalgic Remembering; Poor Wayfaring Stranger

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:44

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5:00-5:40 W P W P F S T S T :08 :14 :20 :22 :29 :34 :36 Key T=Tarantella W=Waltz P=Passing Music F=Falling Gesture R=Rising Gresture C=Chaotic Gresture S=Poor Wayfaring Stranger tune S1=Part 1 S2=Part 2

Figure 7.1  Overall Formal Design: Three sections and Figures, Gestures, and Tune.

In the next part of this chapter, I map in more detail the musical things of the movement, their cultural invocations, and their roles in sound-thinking the incessance of memory.

150  Part II Agitated Dancing: Tarantella and Waltz The tune initiating the movement evokes a tarantella with its compound duple rhythm—a slightly unhinged tarantella, however, with its col legno battuto accompaniment and the hemiola of the fourth measure. The Waltz figure contrasts with a smoother rhythm and more constrained range but retains the sense of a slightly off-kilter dance. In both of these two figures, as cited in Example 7.1, there is a sense of impending derangement lurking in the melodic design of each. Figure 7.2 maps in detail the phrasing design of the music of each of the four subsections of the Agitated Dancing section. The maps of the subsections are: Tarantella-First in Figure 7.2a; Waltz in 7.2b; Tarantella-Second in 7.2c; and Passing in 7.2d. Each map indicates phrase durations by number of measures, timing, harmony, meter and tempo, dynamics, and other significant musical characteristics. The first Tarantella insinuates a phrasing irregularity with a succession of uneven units—4345474—but at the same time a kind of perverse regularity occurs in the recurrence of 4 measure durations and the x+2 sequence of 357. As suggested earlier, the col legno battuto accompaniment and fourth measure hemiola, also insinuate a subtle unhinging. This initiating Tarantella music consists of three different motives in the usual sense of that term. T1 serves as the identifying idea of the dance but other ideas emerge through combination with T1 or as variations. T1H, labels the fourth measure hemiola, and T1E refers to the ending of the fourth iteration of T1 (m. 15), which consists of a rising rhythmic diminution of the motive’s beginning. T3 is a countermotive to T1 first occurring in m. 16. The succession of these motives has a clarity and spaciousness of texture that despite the slight unhinging of the phrase durations, project a sense of balance. The Waltz subsection (mm. 30–59) has regular phrasing durations— 8886—but a kind of repetitive contour-shaping of this dance figure intimates an obsessive tendency. As Figure 7.2b indicates, the Waltz subsection comprises four Waltz motives, which are also shown in Example 7.1. Each motive has a long-short rhythm (half-note/quarter-note) but with varied contour. Example 7.2a maps the differing contours showing intervallic direction with plus/minus signs and interval size by semitones, and the brackets underneath these contour numbers show that each motive involves short repeated segments. The contour variations between the four motives do not change the identity of the waltz or provide elaborations; rather they suggest an obsessive repetition. In relation to the Tarantella, the Waltz subsection seems effortless with its relatively simple homophonic texture, the regularity of phrasing, and its move to a subdominant harmony on modal g. Through the second Tarantella subsection (mm. 59–92) the music becomes increasingly erratic. As Figure 7.2c shows, the passage starts with phrase durations—434—heard in the first Tarantella, but then the durations become increasingly irregular, including in two instances changes of meter (from 6/8 to 9/8) which disrupt a regular metrical flow. The harmony begins

5

6/8 quarter=120 p arco and col legno battuto

Meter Dynamic Artic.

8

12

mp arco

5

4 T1H

T1

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f

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Figure 7.2  Detailed Formal Design: Agitated Dancing section. a)Tarantella—First subsection

0 d modal

3

4

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Figure 7.2b  Waltz subsection.

Time Harmony Meter Dynamic Artic.

mm.

Waltz Figure

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Incessance of Memory  153

Example 7.2 Contour and Range Characteristics of the Waltz and Passing motives. a) Waltz motives b) Passing motives

with a direct restatement of modal d before veering off briefly to g♯ and c♯. The reassertion of modal g sets up the eventual recurrence of modal d to end the passage. The texture becomes more intense with an almost fugal sense of entries of the T1 figure and more counterpoint amongst the instruments, and in m. 77 a new, intensified version of the T3 figure occurs, accentuating the long-short rhythm of the Tarantella motive. Additionally, there is a relatively quick change between different types of articulation, with pizzicato, arco, trills, sul ponticello, tremolo, and generally increasing dynamic. The increasing variety and irregular occurrence of musical things takes on a kind of feverish intensity until it is dispelled abruptly by music of the Passing subsection. The Passing music (mm. 92–117), mapped in Figure 7.2d, brusquely ends the intensity of the Tarantella-Second subsection with a version of the T1H (hemiola) motive—the motive serving to effect the change of meter (from 6/8 to 3/4). Of the three Passing figures, the first two, P1 and P2, are constrained with a narrow contour and a mostly homophonic texture, and the

59

63

:55 d modal 6/8 quater=120 p pizzicato pizzicato+ arco sul ponte

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fp

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mp ordinario pizzicato

T1H

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cҒ

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Figure 7.2c  Tarantella—Second subsection.

Time Harmony Meter Dynamic Artic.

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Figure 7.2d  Passing subsection.

arco

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tiritones

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156  Part II third, P3, repeatedly iterates a rising tritone along with a snaky, chromatic tremolo line in the inner voices. Example 7.2b schematizes these features of the Passing figures, showing melodic contour and range. The subsection itself ends abruptly with an expansive falling gesture—from A7 to B♭2— comprising repeating fragments of P1. Listening through the entirety of the Agitated Dancing section, the frenzied dancing of the Tarantella and the effortless dancing of the Waltz enact a kind of habitual collective memory—a sounding memory of past events and associations brought to the musical present. But as the dancing becomes increasingly erratic and obsessive, the sounding memory itself dissipates. The music of the Passing subsection initially reinforces this feeling of becoming unhinged, but the expansive fall deflates the frenzied repetitions into a kind of blank daze. From this blankness another nostalgic memory arises—the tune of the early American folk song “I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” Nostalgic Remembering: “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” The music of the Nostalgic Remembering section remembers the tune and its cultural resonances in a specific act of collective memory that serves the larger musical trajectory of the movement. The musical remembering of the “Wayfaring Stranger” tune is a specific act of remembering and is distinguished from the habitual remembering of the dances and dancing in the first Agitated Dancing section. Mieke Bal makes the distinction between intentional and habitual memories, emphasizing the narrative role of intentional acts of remembering and the routine and behavioral aspects of habitual memories (Bal 1999). The music of the Agitated Dancing section enacts a habitual remembering of dance movements and their bodily affects, and the music of the Nostalgic Remembering section enacts a specific and collective remembering of the “Wayfaring Stranger” tune that insinuates a nostalgic past of folk-like simplicity. As Edward Casey writes, such specific collective remembering refers to “the circumstances in which different persons, not necessarily known to each other at all, nevertheless recall the same event … each in her own way” (Casey 2004, 23). In this context then, the music remembers the “Wayfaring Stranger” tune as an event which then engenders the rememberings of listeners “each in her own way.” I turn next then to the musical remembering of the “Wayfaring Stranger” tune-event.5 The music of the Nostalgic Remembering section insinuates the world of a fiddle player in early America, a nostalgic remembering with its transparent texture of solo violin. The “Wayfaring Stranger” tune, played by the first violin and excerpted in Example 7.1c, has a woeful character, and while the text does not occur, the music will invoke it for some listeners. The solo violin is soon joined by the cello playing a low and soft chromatic

Incessance of Memory  157 Falling gesture, which both underscores the sense of wandering and carries a trace of the unhinged musical thinking of the previous music. While heard together, the violin I and cello occur as if in different worlds. Figure 7.3 maps out the music of the Nostalgic Remembering section. At the top, it shows two types of subsections—S1 and S2—which correspond to the two parts of the tune and the phrase durations by measures. Rows below the timeline indicate harmony, dynamics, articulations, occurrences of the Rising and Falling Gestures by instrument, and text incipits of the subsections. As the figure suggests, the music of the quartet remembers the tune in a direct and simple way, with regular phrase duration, and stable harmony and meter. But rather than repeating both parts of the tune, as would typically happen in stanzaic performance of the folk tune, the quartet repeats only the second part, S2 (m. 149), which corresponds to the words “I’m going there” or “going home”—a phrase emphasizing the sense of nostalgic longing.6 In this recurrence the texture becomes fuller and the harmony and melodic contour more richly emotional, especially at mm. 158 with the expressive accents of the two fermata chords. This increase in harmonic intensity and the fermata chords creates a new strand of remembering that incites a reactive music, first in the violin and then eventually joined by all. The first violin’s expansive chromatic ascent from G5 to G#6 reacts to the emotional intensity of S2’s recurrence, unhinging the nostalgic orderliness of the quotation. In the midst of this ascent, the cello and viola reinforce this deforming with repetitive fragmentation of the S2 motives in a descent that eventually skews pitch in a slow detuning that brings this section to an abrupt end. Obsessing: Fragmenting and Jumbling The music of the first two sections, while insinuating obsessive and erratic sound-thinking and a nostalgic remembering of the “Wayfaring Stranger” tune, maintains a narrative logic propelling the music temporally forward. That logic falls apart in the concluding Obsessing section. The music of this last section remembers the music of the preceding sections but jumbles the ordering, fragments and transforms figures, and recombines fragments in ways that are obsessive, erratic, and distorted.7 A Rising gesture begins the Obsessing section (m. 175) with upward, scratchy glisses presented successively. The lilting rhythms of the Tarantella figure emerge from the glisses until finally they cohere into a fragment that resembles the T1 figure at m. 188, creating a moment of discernibility. Figure 7.4 maps the occurrences and combinations of the figures and their motives, the gestures, and the segments of the “Wayfaring Stranger” tune starting from this moment of discernibility. In this mapping, the lefthand column indicates the figures, gestures, and tune, and a timeline for this section is given horizontally across the top. The map gives a sense of the fragmentation of figures, their recombinations in new successions and new contrapuntal combinations, and the obsessive

1:58 3:58

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‘‘I’m a poor wayfaring..”

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‘‘I’m a going there/home....”

p

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Figure 7.3  Detailed Formal Design: Nostalgic Remembering section.

Text Incipits

Harmony a modal Meter 3/4 quarter=108 Dynamic mf Artic. arco Vc: Chromatic descent from A3 to C#2 Falling Gesture Rising Gesture

Time

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Figure 7.4  Map of Obsessing Section.

mm.

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160  Part II repetitions of motives. What was a kind of narrative logic of events—while sometimes bordering on obsessive repetition and unpredictability—becomes in this last section an endless riffing through half-remembered motives, gestures and feelings. The haze of these manic combinations and reorderings lifts momentarily when all the instrumental voices join together to recall the second part of the “Wayfaring Stranger” tune (S2, m. 333). This moment of textural simplicity and harmonic richness remembers the earlier harmonic intensity of the S2 part of the tune, especially that music starting at m. 149. Like that earlier occurrence, the harmonic intensity and the emphasis of the fermata chords here also invoke an unhinging musical response. Starting in m. 348, new reactive transformations of the fermata chords give way to Rising Gestures and eventually devolve into Chaotic gestures. As the mapping of Figure 7.4 suggests, the sudden thinning of the texture at m. 333 generates a series of reactive Rising and Chaotic gestures that eventually give way to a slowly unwinding series of Falling gestures involving the T1 and T1E motives of the Tarantella subsections that abruptly end the movement. This abruptness seems to come about through a sheer act of will—a will to be free of the obsessive repetitions and the incessant memories. The third movement of Garrop’s String Quartet no. 2 musically enacts processes of obsessive thinking and incessant remembering. This is a soundaestheticization of human experiences, and as Bal has noted, such aesthetic renditions of experience take the form of “drama” (Bal 1999, ix). In other words, they take time but are distinct from individual experiences of memory and thought because such renditions assume a shared component. The shared component in this instance resides in the realm of collective memory, as Casey has suggested. These memories are “distributed over a given population” and are formed “spontaneously and involuntarily” (Casey 2004, 23–24). Collective memories then have historical, social, and cultural specificity. Sounding within the time and place of contemporary culture of North America, Garrop’s quartet resonates with that culture. The quartet’s sound-thinking through such experiences of obsessive behaviors and incessant memories provides a means of reacting to or reflecting on the feelings of those experiences. notes 1. My thinking about music and storytelling—or music and narrative—has been informed by the extensive discussions concerning whether and how music “tells stories” in the musicological and music theoretical literature. While I don’t directly address this literature in the chapter, it stands as a background to my own thought. In this chapter, I turn the discussion of musical narrativity toward issues of cultural memory and how music both plays a role in cultural memories and how it can employ cultural memories within the fabric of musical thinking. Some recent books on narrativity that include discussions about past approaches are Almén 2008 and Klein and Reyland 2012.

Incessance of Memory  161 2. All timings listed on the analytical maps are taken from the Biava Quartet’s recording: See Biava 2007. 3. The tarantella and waltz figures are not quotations but only allude to some characteristics and associations with those dance types. The tarantella has particular significance at the beginning of the movement since this dance form was associated in the nineteenth century with a frenzied dance to cure the dancer of the bite of the tarantula. While that association has no historical basis, it has been a trope since the nineteenth century. Garrop has confirmed with me that she had the tarantella in mind when composing this figure. 4. The metrical implications of the tune are varied and this is confirmed by various renditions of the tune in either recordings or transcriptions. Garrop notated the tune in 3/4 meter, but to my ear the Biava Quartet performance renders the tune in 3/2 meter, starting the tune on the “and” of 2. The tune is sung by Jack White in the 2003 movie Cold Mountain in simple quadruple meter; “Wayfaring Stranger” was Burl Ives signature tune in the 1950s and he performed it in 3 with considerable rubato (Ives 2004); and Charles and Ruth Seeger transcribed the tune in 3/2 (Lomax 1947). Garst 1980 provides an interesting history of the Wayfaring Stranger tune. 5. The issue of the individual listener for music with quotations or allusions has caught the attention of a wide array of recent authors—see in particular Burkholder 1995 and Metzer 2003. The generative potential for quotations and allusion is a positive and significant force in music, but this is not my focus here. I can report however, that when I have taught this piece in my classes to graduate music students (twenty-somethings) over the last five years, it is not uncommon for them to recognize that this is a familiar folk tune but to be unable to name it or to recite the words. 6. The words of this folk tune are not fixed and numerous variations occur. In recent performance especially, the initial words of the S2 phrase are rendered as “I’m going home.” 7. This is not a criticism of Garrop’s compositional technique. In order to project a musical thinking that is obsessive, erratic, and distorted a prior logic of musical technique must obtain. My analysis focuses on the musical thinking of the movement, not on its technical logic.

Works Cited Almén, Byron. 2008. A Theory of Musical Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bal, Mieke. 1999. “Introduction.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Biava Quartet. 2007. String Quartet no. 2 by Stacy Garrop. Composers in the Loft. Chicago: Cedille Records. Burkholder, Peter. 1995. All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing. New Haven:Yale University Press. Casey, Edward S. 2004. “Public Memory in Place and Time.” In Public Memory, ed. Kendall Phillips, 117–144. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Garrop, Stacy. 2005. String Quartet no. 2., “Demons and Angels.” King of Prussia, PA: Theodore Presser.

162  Part II Garst, John F. 1980. “‘Poor Wayfaring Stranger’—Early Publications.” The Hymn 31/2 (1980): 91–101. Ives, Burl. 2004. “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Klein, Michael and Nicholas Reyland, eds. 2012. Music and Narrative Since 1900. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lomax, John. 1947. Folk Song U. S. A.: The 111 Best American Ballads. Edited by Alan Lomax, Charles Seeger, and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Metzer, David. 2003. Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

8 Spiral Morphing Emergence, Saturation, and Uncoiling in Anna Clyne’s Choke (2004)

Anna Clyne composed Choke in 2004 for baritone saxophone and tape—the “tape” a digital fixed-media part. Created for Argeo Ascani, Choke has a colorful palette of musical sounds. The saxophonist plays a wide variety of sounds, from regularly pitched tones to key clicks, and from multiphonics to what Clyne calls “growling vocalizations” (Clyne 2014). The tape part consists of samples, virtually all of which are of the baritone saxophone changed through digital editing; the one exception is a gong sample.1 Throughout the piece, the source of the tape sounds is often not sonically apparent and these sounds take on their own timbral identity, evoking a variety of worldly associations. The score of Choke includes a staff for baritone saxophone and three staves of what Clyne calls a “transcription” of the tape part to “serve as a linear map for the performer” (Clyne 2004). Example 8.1 cites the first two systems of the score. This short excerpt indicates both the detail of the performance instructions for the baritone saxophonist and the detailed descriptions of the recorded sounds. Clyne instructs the player to produce a wide variety of timbral shadings of tones and to use the instrument in extended ways in order to produce a broad array of tonal colors. The tape staves do not, as Clyne points out, indicate all the sounds of the tape part. But the descriptions given in the part are precisely detailed and give a strong sense of the kinds of sound associations Clyne evokes in Choke. Due to the fixedmedia of the tape part, the score also indicates tape (CD) timings as well as the more traditional metric notations. As a consequence, I refer to timings, rather than measure numbers, in my analysis, and I have determined the timings from the score, the fixed-media CD, and the published recording.2 The musical structuring of Choke engages processes of Spiral Morphing, or in other words, a morphing process that also entails a sense of transformed recurrence. Morphing in this context involves the smooth transition from an earlier event (or events) to new ones. I refer to the initiating and resulting events as sound things for two reasons.3 First, sound things have some similarities to motives in the sense that they are relatively short groupings of sounds characterized by specific sonic features, and they function as recognizable units of identity that play a role in the musical thinking of the work. However, unlike motives, sound things may include a wide variety of sound features: from the nature of the attack of a sound to the extent of its duration, from the noisiness of the sound to the delineation of its pitch

164  Part II

Example 8.1  Choke, Opening—Time 0:00-:38 (mm. 1–12).

movement, and from a specific timbral quality of a sound to the rhythmic character of a grouping of sounds. Second, individual sound things or the interaction of distinct sound things in a specified temporal span may morph into new sound things, such that these sound things generate a sense of continuous differing. A sound thing, then, has specifiable sonic features, and in keeping with the Heideggerian concept, I consider sound things in terms of their functions in the musical thinking of Choke. The morphing process generates emergent relations between sound things; that is, a temporally later and new sound thing emerges from preceding things as a consequence of morphing. These changes produce a sense of refreshing (as when a web-browser refreshes) characterized by both continuity and novelty, by continuous differing. The spiraling process is simultaneous with the morphing process and arises from articulative events—what I refer to as Spiral Events—that mark a temporal place as a sort of reinitiation of the morphing process. The articulative moment of Spiral Events creates a sense of restarting the morphing process as newly emergent sound things follow the articulation. In other words, the spiraling process involves a sense of renewing the morphing process during the articulative moment of the Spiral Event and the subsequent emergence of new sound things.

Spiral Morphing  165 Figure 8.1 schematizes the spiral morphing process for Choke. The figure indicates that the spiral process consists of six spiral morphing loops (which are labeled across the top of the figure). As indicated on the figure, loops one through four are characterized by the emergence of new sound things. The fifth loop entails a saturation of the morphing process, and the sixth loop an uncoiling of the spiral morphing process. The time-line in the middle of Figure 8.1 indicates the times at which the spiral morphing process restarts, and the sizes of the loops refer to the differing durations of each loop. The lowermost row of the figure identifies the Spiral Events that restart the morphing process. The terms there refer to the sound things producing the articulative function of renewal. These descriptive terms are either taken from the score or are determined by me in the analytical process. In both instances, the terms provide linguistic prompts for the sounding features of the events. For instance, at Time 2:08 two simultaneous sounds occur. “Hit” is a descriptive term in the score referring to a noisy sound with a sharp attack, and “Growl-Rip” is also a score-based term referring to a low, noisy sound and subsequent up/down movement through the upper harmonics of the saxophone. All of the Spiral Events are relatively short sounds that serve to articulate a particular moment of renewal. The Spiral Event at Time 5:53 differs from the preceding ones in that it entails an abrupt thinning of the sound— this articulative moment reduces the overall textural saturation of Loop 5 and begins the process of uncoiling during Loop 6. I return to this overall mapping of Choke’s temporal design at the end of this chapter. For now, I turn to a more detailed accounting of Loop 1 and its morphing processes. This detailed account provides some insight into the processes of the ­subsequent loops. Spiral Morphing 1 2 3 4 Loops Emergence................................................

5

6

Saturation

Time: 0:00 Spiral Events

2:08 2:49 3:15 Hit Screech Shwoosh Growl-Rip Gong

4:46 Low Growl

Un

co

ilin

g

5:53

8:35

Abrupt Thinning

Figure 8.1  Processes of Spiral Morphing: Emergence, Saturation, Uncoiling.

Loop 1 is initiated with the first sounding events of Choke—key clicks in the saxophone and static sounds in the tape—but the senses of spiraling and morphing are not immediately apparent. Rather, they emerge over time, and my labeling of the loops and Spiral Events in this analysis indicates a temporally reflective perspective (rather than a real-time perspective). Figure 8.2 maps the sounds of (1:00–2:08) and Table 8.1 provides a key to the figure. For the figure, I have adopted a score-like mapping, showing the saxophone part at the top

:10

:20

Oh--Ah-Oh No vibrato

:30

Gong...higher partials

:40

1:00 :10

:20

:30

:40

Fuzzy Reedy............Ord......

:50

Growl

Pure

2:00 :10

Growl

~~~~~~~

Chime................................................................................. Gong...............................................................................................................................................................................

:50

Pure ...............................................................................................Fuzzy/ Ord/

Figure 8.2  Schematic Mapping of the Baritone Sax and Tape Parts: Time :00–2:08.

Motor

SampleKey Cks Whisper

Sample Sax Rip Screech

Pitch Wobble

Hit

GongTones

Static

Mapping of the Tape Part

Time: Min. 0 Sec.

Rip/ Growl

Pitch Wobble

Long Tones

Key Clicks

Mapping of Baritone Saxophone Sound Things

Spiral Morphing  167 and the tape part at the bottom—a timeline is in the middle. The first column of the maps for both the saxophone and tape parts indicates sound things. As Figure 8.2 suggests, sound things may occur singly or in combination with others to create groupings of various sorts. The ordering of sound things on the mapping—from higher to lower on the page—reflects the sequence of their first occurrence in Choke. For both the saxophone and tape parts, I’ve used a variety of symbols that graphically suggest some features of the sound things. Underneath these symbols, additional descriptive terms indicate timbral inflections of sound things.4 Table 8.1 provides more descriptive detail about the sound things, giving information about pitch register, attack and decay of sounds, pitch changes, timbral properties, and sound associations. As the map of F ­ igure 8.2 and Table 8.1 show, some sound things are unique to the tape part and some are presented by both saxophone and tape. For instance, Static, Gong-Tone, Hit, Screech, and Motor occur only in the tape. Pitch Wobbles occur in both tape and saxophone, and recognizable samples of saxophone Rips and Key Clicks match those sound things presented by the saxophone. In these instances of sound things presented in both parts, the differences of sound production assure a timbral distinction between the versions. The interested reader may wish to follow this score-like map while listening to Loop 1.5 Table 8.1  Sound Things: Abbreviations and Descriptions for Figures 8.2 and 8.3. Sound Thing

Saxophone Description or Tape

Key Click

S and T (sampled) T

Static Long-Tones

S

Gong-Tone

T

Pitch Wobble Hit Rip Growl-Rip Screech Voice-Whisper Motor

S and T T S and T (sampled) S T T T

Symbol

Key clicks—sharp attack, short Sounds like static, noisy, short impulses, sharp attack Relatively long-tones re-articulated with no pitch change, inflected by differing timbral properties Gong sample, long-tones, enhanced upper partials after the attack Relatively long tones with pitch change, inflected by differing timbral properties in both sax and tape Sharp, noisy attack with rising upper partials after the attack Rising or Rising/Falling saxophone figure through the upper harmonics Low growl followed by a rising and falling saxophone rip Rising, noisy, fast gesture Low, vocal whisper Gentle and continuous motor sound, fast whirring effect

Growl

168  Part II Choke’s processes of spiral morphing occur both during the duration of a loop and between successive loops—the latter associated with the process of renewal. I consider next how spiral morphing functions during Loop 1 before mapping the process for the entirety of Choke. Figure 8.3 represents the events of Loop 1, here grouping sound things by similarities and differences of their features. A timeline is shown at the very top of Figure 8.3 and a key to the annotations is at the bottom. The descriptions of sound things given earlier in Table 8.1 for Loop 1 apply equally to this representation of Loop 1. The top two rows of Figure 8.3 show sound things having a type of sharp attack and relatively short duration: Key Clicks and Static.6 The bottom two rows show Long-Tones and Gong-Tones in the saxophone and the tape part respectively, and the three rows directly above show Pitch Wobbles. Both Long-Tones and Pitch Wobbles have sound properties characterized by a relatively soft attack, relatively definite pitch, and some durational extent. The upper middle rows of the figure show sound things such as Rips (in both saxophone and tape) and Screech, both involving a noisy upward pitch movement. And the lower middle rows of the figure indicate sound things such as Hit, Voice-Whisper, Motor, and Growl (of Rip-Growl)—all having noisy, non-pitched properties. The dashed arrows on Figure 8.3 indicate morphing relations between sound things. As the map in Figure 8.3 suggests, Choke begins with timbrally similar sound things in both the saxophone and tape part: Key Click/Static and Long-Tones/Gong-Tones. At Time :50, the sharp, noisy attack of the Hit contrasts with the preceding Long Tones/Gong-Tones and with the simultaneous Pitch Wobble. Time :50 then is a moment of morphing through both differentiation and continuity. Figure 8.3 shows some but not necessarily all of the morphing relations.7 It suggests how through the morphing process later sound things may be heard as emerging from earlier things—or from several sound things. For instance, the Hit of :50 transforms the mediumsoft attack of the Gong-Tones and combines it with the noisy properties of Static and Key Clicks—morphing relations suggested by the dashed arrows on the figure. Other such morphing relations are shown on Figure 8.3, and Table 8.2 summarizes the morphing process between the sound things indicated on the figure. In the left column of the table the sound properties in bold play a role in the morphing process to the emergent sound thing in the right column. The figure and table map out some of the morphing relations, and in particular those having salience for me. With differing circumstances (performer, hall, speakers, etc.) and listeners, however, other possibilities may arise. The spiral morphing process that generates new emergent sound things and the sense of transformed recurrence operate throughout most of Choke, with a few exceptions, which I’ll address shortly. Figure 8.4 maps out events for the entire piece. The first column lists sound things which are grouped by sound features. The grouping is associational and there is no linear

:40

1:00 :10

T: Sax Rip

:20

:40

T: ‘‘Hit’’ T: ‘‘Hit’’

S: Rip

:30

Figure 8.3  Mapping of Morphing Processes of Loop 1.

Key S=Baritone Saxphone--timbral inflections indicated T=Tape--timbre or samples indicated with references names

T: Gong-Tones--soft attack to upper partials

=Morphing Relation

S:Long-Tones, soft attack, Oh-Ah-Oh/non vibrato

T: Pitch Wobble--Gong

T: Pitch Wobble--Chime

S: Pitch Wobble--Pure-------Fuzzy/Ord/Fuzzy

T: ‘‘Hit’’

:50

:50

~~~~~~~ T: Motor

S:Long tone--pure

T: voice, whisper

T: ‘‘Hit’’

S: Rip

:10

Loop 2

T:Screech

2:00

S: Growl-Rip

T:Screech

T:Key Clicks

:30

T: Static--sharp attack, noisy

:20 S:Key Clicks

:10

S:Key Click --sharp attack, short duration

0:00

Loop 1

Time

170  Part II Table 8.2  Morphing Transformations in Loop 1. Bold terms in column 1 indicate morphing properties T: Static and S: Key Clicks—Sharp Attack T: Gong-Tone—Soft attack to upper partials

T: Hit-sharp attack, rising pitch

T: Static and S: Key Clicks—Noisy

S: Pitch Wobble—Fuzzy

T: Hit--Sharp attack, Rising pitch T: Gong-Tone—Soft attack, Rising pitch

S: Rip--medium attack, rising pitch

S: Long-Tones--long tones, no pitch change, timbral inflection T: Gong-Tones—long tones, upper partiaol

S and T: Pitch Wobbles— relatively long tones, pitch change, timbral inflection

S: Rip—Rising/falling pitch T: Static—Noisy

T: “Screech”—Rising pitch, noisy

T: Screech—Noisy, Rising pitch S: Pitch Wobble—Fuzzy

S: Rip-Growl—Noisy to Rising/falling pitch

S: Growl-Rip—Low noisy growl, rising/falling pitch

T: Voice-Whisper—vocal, noisy

S and T: Key Clicks—Sharp Attack

T: Motor—fast pulses with sharp attack

transformational relation from top to bottom. For practical reasons, the sound things are indicated with descriptive names and then indicated by abbreviations. For each sound thing, Table 8.3 gives a fuller description, the approximate time of its first occurrence, its abbreviation, and a description of sounding features. As the map of Figure 8.4 indicates, the spiral morphing processes of Choke generate various and differing sound things. I have listed twenty-eight but this list could grow or shrink depending on the analytical/performative circumstances. Figure 8.4 also shows the Spiral Events within boxes at the articulative moments of Time 2:08, 2:49, 3:12, 4:46, and 5:53.8 For instance, at Time 2:08 two sound things, Hit and Growl-Rip, occur simultaneously. Both of these sound things have occurred prior to this time and hence it is not newness that creates the sense of articulation. Rather, this sense arises from the combination of the two sound things, the change of dynamics and texture after Hit and Growl-Rip, and the subsequent change to new sound things. In other words, it is the articulative moment and the sounding of newly emergent sound things that generate a sense of spiraling—of a renewal of the morphing process. The Spiral Events occurring at Times 2:49 and 3:12 involve a different set of sound things—Gong/Screech and Shwoosh—but the sense of restarting arises in ways similar to that at Time 2:08. The articulative events at Time 4:46 and 5:53 function differently, however. The Low Growl of Time 4:46

Figure 8.4  Mapping of Sound Things during Choke. Gr

Cb -

- -

Ht - -

Sc

Mt---Sw Cb--------------------

Pw---------------------------

Ts-------------------------

Vg-------------

--

-

Bl--------------

-----

Dr-------------------

Lg

Bl-------------------

Pu - - -

Gong-Tones

Chime/bells

Hit

Screech Shwoosh -

Gg---------------------------------------------------------

Sc Sc Ht

Gg

Gg-------------------------

mf

Dr---

8:35

Mt----

- -

-

-

Ht Gb - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Cb -

Pw-----------------------------------------------------------

Ts-----------------------------------------------------------

Fz------

Vs------------------------------------------

St---------

Pu----------------------------------------------------St---------------

Abrupt Thinning

decresc. pp

Pr2-----------------------------------------------------

Loop 6 (Dur: 2:27)

Wa------------------- WaMt----------

--

Vs--------

Kk---------

Pu-------

cresc. fff Loop 5 (Dur: 1:08)

5:53

Mt-------------------

Gr

Pw-------

cresc. f

Pr2----------------------------

Loop 4 (Dur: 1:30)

p

4 :46

Metallic

Ht

Rp - - -

Pw--------------------------------------------

Fz----

K

Loop 3 (Dur::30)

3 :12

Wailing

Growl-Rip

Rip (T/S)

Drone

Pitch Wobble (T/S)

Low Growl

Long Tone (T/S)

Fuzzy Tones

Sm------

Ts----

Prl----------

Vm-------

Mr----

Kc

2 :49

cresc. ff p

Loop 2 (Dur: :40)

fp p

Sax murmurs

Ts-----

St-----

Kc-----

cresc.

2 :08

Voice-murmurs

Voice-Whisper

Growl-Voice

Voices--Singing

K-k-k

Bubbles

Motor

Static

Pulsing

Pulse Rhthmic--Second

Pulse Rhthmic--first

Key Click (T/S)

Loop 1 (Dur: :2:01)

mf

p

Sound things

0

Dynamics:

Time:

172  Part II Table 8. 3  Sound Things: Name, Time of Approximate First Occurrence, Abbreviation, and Description of Sound Properties. Sound things

Time of first Abbreviation Description and Morphing occurrence* Properties

Key Click

0:00

Kc

Pulse Rhythmic— first Pulse Rhythmic— second Pulsing

2:08

Pr1

3:12

Pr2

4:14

Pu

Static

0:00

St

Motor

2:00

Mr

Bubbles

4:20

Bl

K-k-k Voices—Singing Voice Growl

3:11 3:46 4:05

Kk Vs Vg

Voice-Whisper Voice murmurs Sax Murmurs

1:52 2:14 2:26

Vw Vm Sm

Fuzzy Tones

4:10

Fz

Long Tones

 :18

Ts

Low Growl Pitch Wobble

4:46  :50

Lg Pw

Drone

4:46

Dr

Rip (live or sampled)

1:15

Rp

Growl-Rip

1:50

Gr

Wailing

5:06

Wa

Metallic

2:08

Mt

Key clicks of baritone sax—sharp attack, short; sampled key clicks in tape Regular rhythm, first; low, medium sharp attack; “heartbeat” Regular rhythm, second; “bongo” sound Pulsing effect, regular intervals; soft attack; low pitch static sounds—noisy, short impulses with sharp attack Gentle and continuous motor sound, fast whirring effect Bubbly sound, with short, medium sharp and fast attacks “K” vocalizations—sharp attack Voices singing, female, pitched Voice growling, noisy with a medium pitch Vocal whisper, low Murmuring with vocal sounds Murmuring with saxophone sounds Fuzzy and noisy tones in saxophone Long tones in either saxophone or tape, no pitch change, different timbral inflections Low growl sound in saxophone Relatively long tones, changing pitch Long and continuous sound in tape Rising or Rising/Falling saxophone gesture through the upper harmonics Low saxophone growl followed by a rising/falling rip Saxophone glissing figures up and down through the upper harmonics Metallic sounds, often associated with metallic percussion

Spiral Morphing  173 Sound things Screech Shwoosh Hit Chime/bells Gong-Tone

Time of first Abbreviation Description and Morphing occurrence* Properties 1:42 Sc Rising, noisy, fast gesture 3:12 Sw Medium pitch, noisy, fast gesture  :50 Ht Sharp, noisy attack with rising upper partials after the attack  :52 Cb Chime or bells—sharp or medium attack, pitched Gg Gong sample, long-tones, enhanced  :30 upper partials after the attack

*the times indicated reflect when a sound thing is aurally present in the recording (Clyne and Ascani 2012).

begins as if it were going to repeat the Growl-Rip sound thing, and especially the one that served as a Spiral Event at Time 2:08. Instead the Rip part of that event does not occur and the Low Growl is absorbed into the Bubbles and Drone, both at a loud dynamic. At Time 5:53, there is no particular sound thing that plays an articulative function. Rather it is the Abrupt Thinning of texture that produces a sense of change. The Bubbles and Pulsing cease, and a few seconds later the Wailing and Drone become silent. In both of the Spiral Events at Time 4:46 and 5:53, the articulative functions occur by means of a reduction: either of the Growl-Rip sound thing or of the overall texture. These differences in the articulative functioning of the Spiral Events at Times 4:46 and 5:53 are associated with other changes in the spiral morphing process. Over the duration of the first four loops (through Time 4:46) the morphing and spiraling processes generate the sense of transformed recurrence and renewed process. During Loop 5 another sense emerges: saturation. The texture becomes thick with several sound things that either continue in an intensified character from Loop 4 (Pulsing and Bubbles) or emerge through the morphing process (Wailing, Drone). The morphing process becomes saturated during Loop 5 with these sound things, creating an overall intensity that can only be halted. That is, the increasing intensity of Loop 5 is not resolved as one might expect of a traditional climax; rather the Abrupt Thinning of texture at Time 5:53 is a kind of reactive breaking down of a saturated process.9 The events at the beginning of Loop 6 respond to this breaking down in an attempt to restart the spiral morphing process. Several sound things from previous loops recur as recognizable but transformed. These include Pulse Rhythm 2, Pulsing, Static, Voices-Singing, Fuzzy Tones, Long-Tones, PitchWobble, Gong-Tone, Chime-Bells, and Hit. These recurring yet transformed sound things try to restart the process, but these attempts are eventually unsuccessful in reviving the generation of new sound things. This failed attempt to restart the spiral morphing processes plays out over the duration of Loop 6 in an uncoiling of these processes. This sense of uncoiling is generated not only by the recurrence of transformed sound things but also by the thinner texture, softer dynamics, and the repetitions of the warmer timbral

174  Part II character of the Gong-Tone, Voices-Singing, and Long-Tones. Choke ends not with music that concludes the processes of spiral morphing but rather with music that uncoils those processes. The expressive character and force of Anna Clyne’s Choke is generated in part by the processes of spiral morphing characterized by the emergence of new sound things during Loops 1 through 4, the saturation of those processes in Loop 5, and the uncoiling of those processes in Loop 6. As this analysis has suggested, the morphing relations are multiple and dependent on the performative/analytical circumstances. Given that multiplicity, my analysis has defined what DeLanda calls a “possibility space” (DeLanda 2011, passim). Rather than specifying a determinate number of morphing relations, I have opened up a conceptual space for possible relations between emergent sound things. The apprehension of specific morphing relations in any given listening experience may change with the circumstances, but the significant matter for Choke is that its music enables these relations as possibilities. And furthermore, these relational possibilities remain operative during the saturation and uncoiling of the processes during Loops 5 and 6. The emergent spiral morphing relations of any particular listening experience to Choke occur within the constraints of this possibility space, and the particular expressive force of the music arises from the specific and multiple ways that these relations manifest in unique listening experiences. In other words, Choke thinks these processes of spiral morphing and their stages of emergence, saturation, and uncoiling as temporally manifest and expressive forces of musical sounding. notes 1. In an interview and performance available online, Clyne discusses the sound sources of the tape part. See Clyne and Ascani 2014. 2. See Clyne and Ascani 2012 for the published recording. A video to accompany Choke was also created by the artist Jon Niborg Speier and was included in the premiere of the work. I will not be considering the visual component in the analysis. 3. I first introduce the idea of a musical thing in Chapter 3. See pages 79–80. 4. As indicated earlier for Figure 8.1, the descriptive terms appearing in the figures, examples, and tables for this chapter are either taken from the score or determined analytically. 5. The 2012 recording of Choke has been posted at YouTube: https://www.­ youtube.com/watch?v=S6P5YigLvUo 2014. 6. The placement of Key Clicks and Static at the top of the map was prompted by their temporal precedence and has no other musical significance. Other placements on the map are analytically determined according to associations between the features of sound things. 7. Later I discuss morphing relations for the whole piece in terms of a possibility space. This allows for open relational possibilities as opposed to a limited set of relations that serve to determine a fixed structure.

Spiral Morphing  175 8. In certain instances, the moment I have analyzed as articulative does not correspond to the timings given in the score between measures. The Spiral Events are not precise moments, but have some temporal extent. Hence the timings I indicate refer to the approximate moment that a Spiral event begins. 9. The reader with access to the score may be interested to see the graphic that Clyne includes at Time 5:53. There is a screaming stick figure with large teeth that looks like an animated baritone saxophone mouthpiece.

Works Cited Clyne, Anna. 2004. Choke. New York: Boosey and Hawkes. Clyne, Anna. 2014. Choke, Program Notes. Accessed 25 October 2014. http://www. boosey.com/cr/music/Anna-Clyne-Choke/53915. Clyne, Anna, and Argeo Ascani. 2012. Choke. On Blue Moth. Tzadik B007CEW1OA. CD. Clyne, Anna, and Argeo Ascani. 2014. Interview and Performance, Chicago Humanities Festival, November 2011. http://chfmedia.net/podcast/chf-anna-clyne-musicdigital.mp3. Accessed 25 October 2014. DeLanda, Manuel. 2011. Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

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Index

Abbate, Carolyn 11n.2, 12n.3 Adorno, Theodor 19, 39n.7, 48, 54, 61 Agawu, Kofi 68 Ascani, Arego 163 Babbitt, Milton 18, 21–6, 29–35, 39n.12, n.14, n.16, 40n.23, 41n.34, n.35, n.38; “The Composer as Specialist” 22, 32 Bachelard, Gaston 28, 40n.29 Backus, John 24, 28–9 Bal, Mieke 156, 160 Barnes and Edge 27 Barthes, Roland 58, 60, 61, 64n.13, 65n.14, 65n.15 Bauhaus, Dessau 29–30, 35 Berger, Arthur 23–4, 28 Bent, Ian 47, 51, 54, 68–9, 79 Berio, Luchiano 68, 98 Bibliotèque nationale 107, 114, 121n.6 Blum, Stephen 68, 81n.1 Boretz, Benjamin 23–4, 28 Boulez, Pierre 18–20, 31–5, 38n.5, 39n.9, 41n.41, n.42, 42n.43, 48–9, 54, 62 Brown, Theodore 31, 41n.36 Burkholder, Peter 2 Bush, Vannevar 31 Cage, John 38n.5, 39n.11, 40n.28, 41n.31 canon 25–6 cartography 8, 85, 86, 93, 95 Carnap, Rudolf 29, 41n.34 Carter, Elliott 23–4 Casey, Edward 94–5, 156, 160 Cavell, Stanley 35, 42n.44, n.45 cinema 94 Clyne, Anna 74, 79, 82n.12, 163, 174, 174n.1, n.2, 175n.9; Choke 11, 163–65, 167–68, 170, 174, 174n.2, n.5; Steelworks 74, 79, 83n.21

Cone, Edward T. 21–4, 36–7, 42n.46, 49, 55; “Analysis Today” 23 Copland, Aaron 24; Nonet 11 Dallapiccola, Luigi; Il Prigioniero 3 Darmstadt 18–19, 22, 27, 33, 39n.6, n.7, n.8, n.10, n.28 Debussy, Claude 20 DeLanda, Manuel 97, 174 Deleuze, Gilles 10, 124, 125, 126 Deleuze and Guattari 78, 144n.7, 144n.8; What is Philosophy? 78 Derrida, Jacques 59, 61, 62–3 Des Marais, Paul 24 Die Reihe 27–9, 35, 39n.12, n.18 Echoplex 1 Eimert, Herbert 19–20 emergence 97 Empty Bottle 1 Englemann, Paul 30 epistêmê 105 extended technique 71 Fales, Cornelia 53, 56, 71, 82n.8 Fine, Irving 24 Fink, Robert 53, 57 flickering 111, 113–14, 117, 119, 120–21 Forte, Allen 23, 49, 55 Foucault, Michel 58–9, 60 Fromm, Paul 22–4 Fromm Music Foundation 22–3 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 88–9, 98n.8, n.9 Galison, Peter 29–30, 35 Garrop, Stacy 11, 147; String Quartet no. 2 11, 147, 157, 160 Gieryn, Thomas 32 G.I. Bill see Servicemen’s Readjustment Act

178 Index Grove Music Online 69 Gubaidulina, Sofia 70, 82n.6, 125–27, 144n.9; Second String Quartet 70, 123–143 Habermas, Jürgen 86–7 Haraway, Donna 8, 98n.10 Hanninen, Dora 52, 56, 64n.8, 65n.21 Hasty, Christopher 49, 52, 55, 56 Heidegger, Martin 83n.20, 87–88, 98n.9, 99n.13, 105, 121n.1; “The Thing” 83n.20; “The Question Concerning Technology” 105 Heideggerian 83n.26, 88, 164 Hempel, Carl 33, 41n.34 hermeneutics 87–8 indeterminacy 70–1 Hovda, Eleanor 71; Lemniscates 71 Husserl, Edmund 86 Ihde, Don 8, 76–7, 82n.15, 86; Listening and Voice 76 “I’m a Poor Wayfaring Stranger” 147–49, 156, 157–58, 161n.4 Imbrie, Andrew 24 intensity 111, 117, 119–21 IRCAM 106, 121n.4 Kerman, Joseph 12n.9 Kramer, Lawrence 12n.2 Kovács, Inge 33, 38n.3 Krenek, Ernst 18, 24, 33 landscape 94–5 Lang, Paul Henry 23; Problems of Modern Music 22–23 Lebrecht 11n.2 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 34, 41n.40, n.42, 58, 60 Lewin, David 24, 36–7, 68, 81, 82n.18 lifeworld 86–7 Ligeti, György 19–20, 74; Artikulation 74 linguistic polysemy 59 luminance 111, 113–14, 119–21 macroperceptions 8, 86–9, 91 McClary, Susan 12n.9 McCreless, Patrick 37, 39n.12, 42n.48 memory 147, 156, 160 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 87 Messiaen, Olivier 18 microperceptions 8, 86–91

mimesis 58 Modern Music 23, 25, 39n.17 Morgan, Robert 34, 52–3, 56 museum culture 2 Music Analysis 37, 38n.1 musical behavior 7 musical things 9, 147, 149, 153 National Science Foundation 31 New York Times 1 Nono, Luigi 19, 39n.9 Occitan 10, 107 Old Provençal see Occitan Palisca, Claude V. 47, 51, 54 Perspectives of New Music 23–4, 28, 35–6, 39n.12 Polanyi, Michael 31–2 portolan charts 94 post-classical 2 post-minimalist 2 postmodern 2, 10 post-phenomenology 8, 85–6, 89 post-philosophies 8, 85, 97 Pousseur, Henri 27–8, 41n.29, n.30; Quintet in Memory of Anton Webern 28; Symphonies à Quinze Instruments 28 Princeton University 6 Princeton Seminars in Advanced Musical Studies 22 radiance 105–6, 111, 113, 117, 119, 121 Ricoeur, Paul 59, 61, 65n.19 Rihm, Wolfgang 83n.22; Am Horizont 83n.22 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 31 Rosen, Charles 24 Roubaud, Jacques 107; La Fleur Inverse: L’art des Troubadours 107 Rougier, Louis 34, 41n.41 Roulette 1 Rudel, Jaufré 10, 106–7, 114–15, 121, 121n.6, 122n.8; “Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai” 107 Saariaho, Kaija 10, 69, 106–7, 114–15, 121, 122n.9; L’amour de loin 107, 122n.9; Lonh 10, 69, 105–111, 114–15, 117, 119, 121, 122n.9 Salzer, Felix 25, 40n.21, 50, 55, 63 Salzman, Eric 24

Index  179 Schenker, Heinrich 20, 25–6, 40n.21, n.22, 42n.43 Schenkerian 22, 25, 40n.21, n.23 Schoenberg, Arnold 18, 22, 40n.23 Scott, Joan 76 scientism 5, 12n.8 Second Viennese School 18 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act 20 Sessions, Roger 21–25, 39n.13, 40n.22 Sewell, William 6, 48, 60 Shifrin, Seymour 24 simulacrum 58, 60, 61 Smith and Protevi 124 Society for Music Analysis 37, 38n.1 Society for Music Theory 37, 38n.1 Solie, Ruth 38n.2 Slate 1 sound thing 163–68, 170, 172–74, 174n.6 sound-thinking 7–9, 69, 78–81, 86, 89, 90, 92, 97, 99n.12, 149, 157, 160 Spektral Quartet 1 Spiral Events 164–65, 170, 173, 175n.8 Spiral Morphing 163, 165, 168, 170, 173–74 Steinberg, Michael 24 Steinecke, Wolfgang 18, 39n.9 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 19–20, 24 Stravinsky, Igor 2, 18, 22, 24 Structuralism 7, 38n.3, 39n.5, 41n.40, 47, 57–61, 62 super-rationalism 28 Szendy, Peter 82n.13, n.15 Tarantella 148–51, 153–54, 156, 157, 160, 161n.3 technê 105–6, 121, 121n.1 temporal becoming 74, 79 Thomalla, Hans 71; Albumblatt 71

Thurs, Daniel 29; Science Talk: Changing Notions of Science in American Popular Culture 29 timbre 49, 53 Tomlinson, Gary 12n.9, 38n.2, 81n.1 Tommasini, Anthony 3 Treitler, Leo 12n.9, 36, 38n.2, 40n.19, 50, 55 UC Berkeley 39n.12, 42n.44 University of Southern California 28 Upshaw, Dawn 108–9, 121n.3, 122n.9 Ussachevsky, Vladimir 23 Vanhoenacker, Mark 1 Varèse, Edgard 18 Verbeek, Peter-Paul 89 Vienna Circle 29–30, 35, 41n.34, 41n.41, 42n.43 Walters, Ronald G. 27 Wason, Robert 37 Webern, Anton 20, 28, 39n.10, 41n.30; Quartet, op. 22, 28 Wehinger, Rainer 74, 82n.9 Weinberg, Henry 24 Westergaard, Peter 24 Wet Ink Ensemble 1 Whitney, John 39n.11 wild Up 1 Wittgenstein, Hermine 30 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 29 Wolff, Christian 39n.11 Wood, Denis 9, 94 World War II 5–7, 12n.8 Yale University 6, 39n.12 Zorn, John 70, 82n.6