Misplaced Concreteness
It's come to this --
**a theme is misplaced concreteness**
This is to say that a theme is a particularly memorable artifact of certain prolongations. This statement involves agreement (or complicity) with some Schenkerian ideas.
This proposes a musical value. To get there we have to consider dispensing with some habits, such as, **a theme is a good thing**. Misplaced concreteness sounds negative....; yes, just a wee bit.
A theme is a great thing. Your blue-haired old lady complains about "not enough tunes".
I agree with her. Sometimes the blue-haired ladies are correct.
Therefore, the misplaced concreteness that we hear as a theme must be continually re-purposed for specific prolongational ends.
Themes must be adaptable. In Bach suites the theme is adaptable, and does not always appear twice in the same form.
There is a counterpoint of reifications -- the theme is a reification; the prolongation is a different thing on a different speed and we reify it when we talk about it.
This is translated in first year music theory as "imperfect cadence", "half cadence", "perfect authentic cadence".
In post-tonal music these things are, except in Babbitt and and few others, considered as quaint a rhyme and verse, but I do not subscribe to this prevailing value.
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