Music Inside Out

Going Too Far in Musical Essays

John Rahn, Benjamin Boretz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134396290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

John Rahn's prolific activities as a composer-theorist-teacher, inventor of computer sound-synthesis software, editor of Perspectives of New Music during the 1980s and 90s, and author of an exemplary text on atonal theory are conspicuously in the foreground of the academic music-intellectual world. This collection of essays charts Rahn's progression from the construal of music's data structures to the articulation of its experiential structures, leading to the question of its moral infrastructures and its value systems of the internal and external worlds. This book shows Rahn's remarkable intellectual evolution, culminating in the recognition that the pressure bearing on discourse can only be contained by thought formulated in the non-referential language of the arts themselves. Also includes 18 musical examples.

repetition

john rahn

LEARNING TO BE A MUSICIAN ALWAYS involves learning to repeat sounds, or more precisely, to repeat in a new sound some quality or complex of qualities heard in some previous sound. Paul Valéry, in his typically nineteenth-century poet’s admiration for music, marveled at and envied musical instruments, whose like does not exist for poetry—each instrument a laboratory for producing at will carefully measured quantified doses of particular qualities (Valéry 1961). The musical instrument is a paradigm of such quantified, repeatable doses: Des Esseintes’s mouth organ, and his “syntax of smells” (Huysmans 1959). Music, like empirical science, is grounded on the repeatable experience.

All musical structure derives from repetition. Imagine a series of sounds none of whose perceived qualities repeats—where qualities include relational qualities of any kind and any complexity, such as pitch-interval-from-previous-sound, or in-the-key-of-Bb, or of-hexachordal-area-{1 2 5 6 9 10}. Such a non-repeating series can have no structure, by definition; the series is “random,” if as chimerical as the unicorn (since human perception always structures, and also because even the mathematical determination of randomicity is problematic). Moreover, if internal structure is perceived within a series, there is necessarily repetition of some sort in the series as perceived. On the other two hands, a series may contain repetition yet be either structured or “random” (as in any computer-generated random number series, where individual digits repeat here and there, and an overall algorithmic pattern repeats also, albeit a very long one); and if a series is unstructured, then it may or may not contain repetition. To summarize these remarks, let R stand for “is a series that contains some sort of repetition,” and let S stand for “is a series that has internal structure.” Then respectively (universally quantifying over x), ~R(x) → ~S(x) and S(x) → R(x) and R(x) → S(x) OR ~S(x) and ~S(x) → R(x) OR ~R(x). So while structure and repetition are not logically equivalent (in which case S would imply R and R would imply S), they are closely involved: if structure, then repetition, and if no repetition, no structure. The experience of the second or subsequent instance of any quality or relation precipitates a structure: recognition conditions cognition.

How then is repetition associated with boredom? The goddess of repetition shows a triple aspect: there is repetition itself, which is lively; there is répétition, or rehearsal, which is only re-animated, a zombie or revenant, and there is slavery, which is dead. The differences among these three aspects have to do with telos, or final cause.

Slavery lacks telos. One thing is enslaved to another when the second repeats the first without final cause; nothing is happening; they have no future, no exit: Sartre’s hell, without possibility of transcendence. Boredom.

Répétition is repetition in the presence of a given global telos, a goal with respect to the thing repeated. There is already an idea or picture of the whole thing repeated, to which successive presentations are supposed ever more closely to approximate. The telos, however admirable, does not change or grow, and the thing repeated changes inessentially and perhaps only in small increments from presentation to presentation, yet the process of successive approximation imparts a certain wan glow of pseudo-life to the series and thus to its components, les revenants.

In contrast, what I would like here to call “repetition” is repetition within a larger thing whose telos is not given (as in répétition), but is in the process of being formed. Such subglobal repetition is not répétition because the point is not to perfect (τελεω) the thing repeated, by accomplishing its telos, but to point beyond the thing repeated to the thing being formed. This is lively because it escapes the dead hand of some prefigured order; like life, it is a process of continual transcendence toward who knows what end. The focus is always forward, un-self-ish, opening away from the current entity in the direction of something larger and unconfined.

Naturally this lively kind of repetitions is what makes, say, Beethoven’s Eroica out of repeated qualities and quality-complexes such as Eb-chordness and Cb-ness. Repetition is, as I hope to show, more than merely analytical in the sense of laying out all the relevant repeatable component elements of a piece, like a disassembled automobile engine; this would be trivial. The involvement of repetition as an action constituting time and life from the inside makes it equally constitutional for the spirit of music. To understand how this may be, it is necessary first to interrogate repetition minutely as to its particulars.

• • •

Subglobal repetition: live repetition: how does it work? Let us ask a schema of bare repetition, A = {a, then-a}. The schema A itself is outside time, but it is a schema of a temporal experience: first I experience a, then then-a, which is a again. The context changes: a is not then-a. (So what is it that is repeated?) A the global thing is the change of context. The change of context constitutes A and reflects back into each a.

But if a is not then-a, what do we recognize as a/then-a? Is a then-a after all? Of course not—worse, a is not even a-of-{a, then-a}, and then-a is not then-a-of{a, then-a}. But abstract from context: a-of-{a, then-a} becomes a and then-a-of-{a, then-a} becomes then-a, abstractly.

But is it possible to abstract from context? From this context? From any possible context? Not only is it possible, but inevitable, as abstraction-from-context is the only kind of abstraction there is. This is the operation that makes the notion of a thing. A thing as grasped is itself abstracted from any possible context. A thing endures for us, temporally, by virtue of abstraction from changes-of-context; a thing’s boundaries, which hold it in existence for us as a cupped hand holds water, are constructed for it by us by means of an act of abstraction, drawing the thing out from its context (ab + trahere). Such an ontology encounters problems both practical (where to draw the boundaries, the practical problem of Sichselbstgleichleit (Koyré 1961a) and theoretical (the cognitive chicken-and-egg problem—how can one abstractly constitute or cognize a thing before knowing what it is, before being able to re-cognize it?—and the problem of the world: how can that which is for me be also for others and in itself?). Such problems are well known; attempts at solving them form a large part of philosophy. In the meantime, the ontology sketched above will have to do go on with.

So the basis for cognizing a is there, and then-a is a with added context—specific context—context of {a, then-a}. When we re-cognize a in then-a, we cognize anew the added context that makes a then-a, a new context that is fused with and originally presented with the a of then-a. In fact the a of then-a is secondary, derived, an abstraction from the primordially presented cognition of then-a. So recognition is derived from cognition: cognition gives then-a, then abstraction gives a-from-then-a, which we recognize as a. (But remember that recognition conditions cognition.)

How is the global thing A = {a, then-a} describable as the change of context? It is itself a context but a change-of-context may be a context. The cognition of time lies in the then of then-a. Time as a thing is then abstracted from all possible contexts-that-are-changes-of-context. (Since time is essentially implicated in changes-of-context, this makes time an unsatisfactory kind of thing.)

But A = {a, then-a} is a particular context-that-is-a-change-of-context. It is not, say {b, then-a}, nor is it {a, then-a, then-again-a}. How do we recognize A? The same way we recognize a. Play the record twice: {A, then-A}. But we have not been thinking of a as itself a temporal thing, while A embeds within its thinghood the then of time. To be a temporal thing is to refer to time essentially, as A does. A temporal thing can contain other temporal things, as when I drive to work I drive first to the freeway, then drive south to 50th Street, and so on: my-driving-to-work, a temporal thing that contains temporal subthings.

After the foregoing remarks, the change of context that is A deserves re-inspection. We have been notating A as the set {a, then-a}, but describing it as a change of context. A set alone is itself a static thing. A change-of-context manages to remain dynamic, a change, even while being a thing. It is the neutrality of the notion of set that fits it for the foundational study of notions of order, as in the set-theoretical definition of tuple and number in the foundations of mathematics, or for the notation of change-of-context here, {a, then-a} = {then-a, a} = A, which is a temporal thing by virtue of the then. As is well known, any ordering can be interpreted in time or in other suitable dimensions. Thus {a, then-a} is equivalent to the ordered pair <a, a> interpreted in time. This will justify all sorts of mathematical manipulations of temporal relations represented as relations of order. From the opposite perspective, the notion of order is a thing that is abstracted from different kinds of experiences: {a, then-a}, {spatial-thing, closer-spatial-thing}, {pitch, higher-pitch, even-higher-pitch}, and so on.

It would be a mistake to question the notion of order about the nature of any of its experiential interpretations, just because it has been abstracted from them and has thus discarded the kind of information that differentiates {a, then-a} from, say, {pitch, higher-pitch}. Abstraction removes us from the scene of the experience itself in all its inherent obscurity, from the ineffability of quality and the obstinacy of things, and their resistance to “adéquation” (Merleau-Ponty 1964).

Following this line of thought reveals that the temporal experience {a, then-a} is itself abstract in an essential way: a-for-Mary is not a-for-John. According to the ontology referred to above, the notion of Mary-for-herself is Mary’s ongoing project of abstraction from the temporally open set of all x-for-Mary. Such a set always has a most recent member, and may have an earliest member (though determinacy fades in that direction), but never has a final member—or perhaps just once, if one can be said to experience one’s own death, as opposed to the events of one’s dying.

When Mary and John are sitting together listening to music, a temporal segment of Mary’s set is concurrent with a segment of John’s set. What is it that they both experience? Let m be some musical event for both Mary and John: m is a depersonalized, or rather interpersonalized, experience made possible by abstraction from m-for-Mary and m-for-John. Like A, M’ = {m, then-m} is temporally recursive in nature—each interpersonal musical experience is temporal and may contain other interpersonal musical experiences.

The abstraction of m involves the problem of intersubjectivity. How can John know m-for-Mary, or Mary know m-for-John, so that either person may abstract m? This is the domain of music theory: the construction of the interpersonal m. Mary and John negotiate some agreement about m. Lan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the series
• Introduction
• Repetition
• Differences
• Centers; dissenters (music, religion, and politics)
• Aspects of musical explanation
• Notes on methodology in music theory
• New research paradigms
• D-light reflecting: the nature of comparison
• Logic, set theory, music theory
• How do you du (by milton babbitt)?
• What is valuable in art, and can music still achieve it?
• Music as anti-theater
• Permissions