Music as anti-theatre: a text about some writings by John Rahn.

1. AN ARTICLE ABOUT DU

TAKING A DEEP, hard look at the first aggregate of Milton Babbitt's Du, (1) John Rahn is finely positioned to activate his special gift for uncovering, exploring, spinning a multidirectional array of subject-threads, each exploding an expansive, revisionary perspective on the textual core. Assaying the initiatory sonic data of Du, trying to find a construal of its "meaning" (leave "meaning" as a place-holder) by a simple convergence of pitch, pitch-class, timespan facts on the ground heard as instantiations of Babbitt-type theoretical entities, leads John, first, to a speculative polyphony of pitch-structure-defined rhythms (each reading of which is created in each case by a conceptual ontologization of a "plain fact," extended as a defining frame into subsequent music)--and then, precipitously, into a rigorously critical formal exposition of the grounding concepts and assumptions which this construal takes as given. John recapitulates this narrative odyssey: (John's text:) "An initial plunge--right off the b at--into the initial particulars of Du, bravely aiming to talk merely about 'the data,' found itself pressed (by cumulative possible miscomprehensions of 'the data' as so talked-about) toward explication of some very little bits of the theory by which that 'data' came into existence (e.g., the 'datum' of the 'second trichord halfnote'). The interdependence of data (theoretical constructs) and theory, so illustrated, becomes a problem whenever the audience of an exposition of the data might hold different theories and so perceive different data . . ." A discursive/compositional strategy: to lead a mind-dance through a complexifying skein of data construed in a highly biased way, leaping off into a quick but intricate excursion into a fragment of music-conceptual formalization (defining with cliche-excavating, bromide-problematizing rigor such hitherto inert, unproblematic music-dictionary commonplaces as "timespan," "arpeggiation"), working back from the formalism (via a notion of "elimination") to a problemat ization (at least within the context of the so-far tendered reading of Du) of a single note in the piece, and an intense complexification of a familiar predicate: (John's text:) "... the tonal operation that consolidates pitch-timespans (de-arpeggiation) may be workable, mutatis mutandis, in a serial theory, but the tonal operation into the background that eliminates pitches while consolidating their timespans (neighbor note) is dependent on a 'content-determinate' syntax. How then can the elimination of the A[b flat] to form 'the second trichord half-note' be other than arbitrary?" [Here follows a discussion of the relation between syntactical twelve-tone set order and compositional "partial order," and its formulation as a "rule."] "[On the strength of a later inference of a background pc-ordered set], either the first or the second A[b flat] must be ignored if the partial pc order is to fulfill the relation. One of the A[b flat]s is 'illegal' under this rule."

Having reasoned back from surface tokens to syntactical entities (such as: a 3-pc-partitioned background set), the text regroups to create from that surface a virulent compositional action: the unfolding of a polyphony of 2-pc tunes (03 in shape) enacting an inner-converging complex enclosed by an outer-diverging one: The reification of this complex opens the way for a discovery of a timespan phraseology analogous to the pitch phraseology. And within the terms of these identified music-active characters, a comprehensive--a multiply comprehensive--close reading of measure 1 of Du is articulated (based essentially on the contour of the first three pitch-time sounds). Such comprehensiveness is as threatening of closure as it is gratifying to the appetite for complex coherence: a ferment of incompleteness is wanted, to enable there to be a "rest of the piece"--rather than, say, a second through nth-measure piece attached to a measure-1-length piece. From which the question arises, in the form of a Cartesian introspection on the ontological status of adumbration, of--to read the text "proactively"--the presence of the energies of the future in the stabilities of the present.

So within John Rahn's piece on Milton Babbitt's piece there ensues a subtle-unacknowledged--shift, in response to the issue of a future implied in a text up to "now": the shift is--with inexorable logic--from the receptual sense-making perspective to the compositional-speculating one. The sense of pre-diction is not the metaphysical--deterministic--"expectation" in the orbit of, say, Leonard Meyer's writings; it's more like an imagined mind-trip into the head-laboratory of a fermenting compositional process in progress; that is, this text imagines how to arrive at what gets to be there by imagining imaginative compositional thinking of a certain highly charged type. The section of John's article headed Pitch, voicing is a model for how a choice might be made, by being perceived (and thus stipulated) as implicated: extending the phraseology from the initial dyad/trichord nest of (03)s in a (015) context to a longer spanned unfolding of four (025) (registrally articulated) tunes. And then the text flows into a deeper (if still implicit) evocation of an "inside-outside" rhythm/pitch event, which in turn (under the sign of Rhythm) is mapped as a timespan event created by a flow of pitched sets, which have been reified as meaningful.

2. DRAMA OF DISCOURSE/THEATER OF MUSIC

John's text creates a drama for an experience of Du. Creates it by building a palpable mental enclosure within which it accumulates an expansive--and hence intensifying--story of the character, contents, and substance of that experience--and, hence, an intensity of experience of its own. It identifies and construes some data in a highly restricted way, asserts some deep problematics that this construal is seen to extrude, then isolates two predicates whose formal definition (given in the text) constitutes a particular mode of explicating--giving determinacy to--the object-types of which the particular "objects" being denoted are instantiations. And then, in the highly charged terms it has created, it struggles spectacularly to give the background theory cogency to the foreground of compositional ideas. Rounding from the formal definition of "ARP" ("arpeggiation") to the problem of "partial ordering" to a reconsideration of the notes of the first measure of Du (specifically, that one A[b flat]) is, at least, a dazzl ing drama of self-created issues and characters. But much more, it is a particularly fine piece of close reading of a musical text drawing on, and giving voice to, the serious concerns of serialist compositional thinking. Accept the premises of concern, sit with the text and score side by side, and not only will you be drawn into and through an absorbing trajectory of problematics created and confronted and powerfully reconstructed, you will also find yourself opened into a world of new information--new at least in its creative and hermeneutic juxtaposition of otherwise dramatically non-associated components, ranging among Tamil rituals, Church's thesis, Prufrock's malaise--nor even counting the broad spectrum of explicitly music-theoretical texts invoked.

Schoenberg complained about Schenker's sketches that he missed seeing his favorite tunes configured in them; clearly he was being an ontological absolutist: I might think that Milton's Du--wherever your description of it starts-"is" existentially entangled with a peculiarly "lateral" temporality--a "rhizomatic" multidirectionality rather than a "classical" "arboreal" polylinear but univocal forwardness; the odd float of a fractured melodism in the piano and a hyperextended lyricism in the voice--both drawing crucially on their countercultural anti-references to historical paradigms signified by those words--is, too, crucial as both input to and output from that idiosyncratic temporality. Does John Rahn's piece "account" for such qualities? And if it does, or doesn't, is that germane to the question of whether it qualifies as "a description of Du"? Answer to question two: all musics are radically neutral, absolutely unresistant, fully compliant in any sense you care to require to any description or analysis, a ny mode of description or analysis, you decide to inscribe them into. Except, that is, where the story as read by someone fails to qualify as a story of that piece for that person; but that problem is mislocated in the theoretical domain. The precise compositional nature of John's piece, which I have been reading as high intellectual drama-- even including the precise ways in which it is transcendently comprehensive and cosmically fractional at the same time--is crucial to its character and drama, because its drama is enacted not only within the circle of its own contexts, terms, constructions, juxtapositions, thoughtspan rhythms, but also against the backdrop of other discourse, the sounds of Bethany Beardslee-Robert Helps playing-singing, the score--against each and all of which its specific defiant pungent barbed idiosyncratic selfhood is crucially personified. It's also an understood part of John's discourse--of, indeed the discursive cosmos he not so much inhabits as internalizes or maybe just fantasizes --that sharp questions are provoked; the problems naturally raised by his text are as much (at least "socially") a signification of his text as are the tokens in the score, or the sounds on the record. You have to travel with him to relate to the problems not only as interesting and meaningful, but even as problems: how to discriminate the "syntactical" from the "associational" structure without the intervention of some deus ex machina that fatally encumbers the desired perceptual lucidity hopefully attainable by rigorous consistency? To do his piece, does John need to have a 12-pc-system assumption? Is that assumption desired by the piece, is it different in species from the old-school kind of "tonal" assumption? Does there want to be a retreat from "contextuality"--are we finding out, maybe, that "contextuality" is at least partly a cover for another--a distinct and radical--set of biases whose assumptions are-canonically--hidden? Does that liberating music-ontological revolution rest on yet another Dogma o f Empiricism--is "contextuality," like "indeterminacy," something that ultimately inheres more in the domain of discourse than in the ontology of music de-structuralized, re-contextualized, perhaps, as music? (2) Contextuality and indeterminacy are probably best understood as interesting creative and perceiving strategies, like an intense compositional vision, but "intertextuality" is probably more like the story of real life.