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