{1, 4...} to 8
At the onset of Covid Time, early 2020, I was in the throes of creating a Clarinet Trio for Veritas Musicae in Korea, facing this question--
Whither the reality that {1, 4....} to 8 members also happens to be the complement of 0127?
For a full 100 measures, the second half of the middle section, the piece is limited to those 8 pitches. Since then, I've come to think of this as Oulipian.
--Oulipo--
G Ab C Db F Gb Bb B
The section is bounded on either side by conspicuous landings of the pungent, hard to miss complement
A D D# E --- 0127
In measure 249 in the Dresden Amen;
and in 365 at the start of the recap.
Those 100 bars are a contrarian homage to what's one either side.
At the time I knew well enough that I could not answer the whither question, I could do the question, perform it -- Developing tunes and motives in that 8 note universe will yield nice epressions of the {1,4....} to 8 aspect. And conspicuous landings on the two 0127 partitions of the 8 will do justice to that expression of the 8.
With that {1, 4...} to 8 performance I was getting something like the evasions and reroutings that Ben Boretz has mention as a big concern in his music. I'd never gone down this road before. I was skeptical. You should be even more skeptical.
Now, almsot 2 years later, nothing's changed, and yet, so much water under the bridge. Yes, things have changed.
First, Paul Griffiths mentioned casually last month that literature can learn more from music. No doubt, and it's clear to me now that what literature might get from music it often gets from Schopenhauer. And I now see what composers do mirrored in Griffiths' Oulipian work.
Griffiths' *let me tell you* is in Ophelian, using only words spoken by Ophelia in the play.
And more recently I am considering music broadly, and Oulipian compositional devices in particular, in connection with Vaihinger.
Matthew Greenbaum introduced me to --Vaihinger-- just a few days ago. If I have it right, Vaihinger's work is an elaboration of Kant's *As If* discussions, very much as Greenbaum elaborates on Wolpe's attrition, and Wolpe's 9-note sets; and much as Babbitt elaborates on Schoenberg's combinatoriality, bringing to light so much more that Schoenberg was not aware of. Ben Boretz speaks of "imagining in a context". Oulipos is imagining in a context. It's not unatural, it is an entry.....to nature, or anti-nature, as you please. (Scroll to the bottom for Greenbaum's Nameless.)
Wendell Berry and others worrys about reductionism. Is modernism reductionistic? Imagining in a context is does not have to be reductionistic. It's a way into an infinite space. Total serialism in good hands is holistic.
As ifs -- useful fictions -- Vaihinger concentrates on their usefulness in science. They differ from hypothoses in that we know and all agree they are not true. He mentions Linneus. Start parsing the vast array of species and categorize them in the wrong fashion. That cracks a nut, brings our attention to incongruities that lead to a more accurate parsing of genus and species, etc. A wrong classification will lead to the correction of errors such as the one made famous by Goethe and his intermaxillary bone. The human intermaxillary bone was hard to find. It is fused in a such a way that it's not seen at first as being a variant of the intermaxillary bone in other mammals. Arrogant humans took pride in that until the matter was clarified.
And Vaihinger mentions Goethe's Urpflanze as a clear example of a useful fiction.
Vaihinger is interested in mythology and aesthetics. Composers and writers know as well as Vaihinger the value of "as ifs". It is everywhere in creative work. For some years, I've been propoposing an aesthetic and secular soteriology. We might be able to cracked that through examining artistic as ifs.
Music theories are theories of grace. They are soteriological.
All I hope to get out of this soteriology is a sort of "as if", a reification (?), somehow placing our condition in front of us, as in the palm of our hand, this yielding the thing, the objectification that we associate with Nietzsche, who formulated it very memorably.
returning to this:
At the time I knew well enough that I could not answer the whither question, I could do the question, perform it -- Developing tunes and motives in that 8 note universe will yield nice epressions of the {1,4....} to 8 aspect. And conspicuous landings on the two 0127 partitions of the 8 will do justice to that expression of the 8.
We do not understand the world when we are pondering over its problems, but when we are doing the world's work.--Vaihinger
Vaihinger keeps us mindful that "whither" is not necessarily the right question. He draws a circle around whithers. Or "whither?" doesn't get the answer you expect; you don't get more words, you might get music or poetry. (No surprise to be be thinking now of Wittgenstein.)
What I leave for later is the notion of "natural". I suspect that in music & literature it is as it is in linguistic usage and fashion, with battle lines all over it all.
Greenbaum's Namelss
The protean, swirling elemental materials congeal into a Psalm Without Words that is a tribute to Wolpe.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey