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COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Washington
IF NOTES ARE ASSEMBLED, a course of direction becomes tangible" ("Any Bunch of Notes: A Lecture," 296). (1) These words from Wolpe's lecture "Any Bunch of Notes" suggest two important directions in his thinking about musical form. The last word "tangible" reaches Out toward visual forms and the temporal aspect of painting, where each new brushstroke reconstructs and re-energizes a web of visual connections and the balance between form and empty space. The opening "If notes are assembled" (where the conditional includes a tantalizing if oblique reference to charged silence--what if notes are not assembled?) suggests the remarkable individuality of Wolpe's musical forms and his ideas about form, ideas as distinctive and charismatic as his ideas on pitch-class circulation, proportions, and the music itself.
This paper engages aspects of form in Wolpe's music, informed by his writings. It has three parts, devoted to conceptual issues, theory, and analysis. Part One explores Wolpe's ideas about form and some of their practical implications. Part Two develops a vocabulary and theoretic framework that support detailed analysis and critical study of Wolpe's musical forms. The reach of this theory is extremely broad, encompassing much contemporary music as well as common practice tonal music. Excerpts from Form for Piano (1959) illustrate these theoretic concepts, revealing subtleties of form that elude other approaches and providing a basis for stylistic comparison between compositions. Part Three presents a detailed analysis of several passages from Form IV (1969), the only other work Wolpe composed for piano solo after 1955. Closing remarks integrate Wolpe's ideas on form with their theoretic representations, and consider points of stylistic comparison and contrast between Form and Form IV based on aspects of asso ciative organization revealed by the analysis.
I. CONCEPTUAL ISSUES
In music parlance, "form" has two common meanings. The first involves classification in terms of a repetition scheme, often articulated by tonal relationships as in ABA', sonata form, rondo, etc. Clearly, where Wolpe is concerned this will not get us very far. Large-scale returns are rare in his music, and on the few occasions they do occur it seems Wolpe did not think of them in the standard sense. (2) His writings avoid schema at all levels, even the terms "theme," "motive," and "gesture." In "Thinking Twice" (304), he instead refers to "organic modes," "genenc sets," "organic tasks" and "organic habits," (3) a phrase that connects nicely with "growth habit" in botany, a term that recognizes "the plant [as] a dynamic organism, forever augmenting and modifying its shape" (Bell 1991, 314).
If the musical work possesses a certain content, a significance, if it means something, its meaning is inherent in the work itself and is equally present in the whole. The content here cannot be external to what we call form; it is immanent in this form. ("To Understand Music," 9)
Wolpe's choice of words suggests that for him "form" is primarily a verb; it only becomes a noun when patterns of relation are abstracted from temporal process. This is closer to a second common meaning of "musical form": t he totality of events in a musical composition, or the "shape of a musical composition as defined by all of its pitches, rhythms, dynamics, and timbres" (New Harvard Dictionary of Music, 1986, 320). In his 1953 lecture "To Understand Music," Wolpe clearly identifies meaning in music with musical material, and form with content:
Significantly, though, Wolpe identifies musical form not with the events per se, but with their patterns of relation unfolding in time. His view of form--or, music formation--is eminently contextual and processive. Later in the same lecture he writes:
...to understand a piece of music is to recreate its unique personality as it first emerged in the mind of the composer. This recreation does not require a memory capable of retaining the whole of the work from beginning to end. The synthesis proceeds progressively, moving with the flood of sound each moment of which thus bears in a sense the accumulated burden of the preceding moments, not because we remember them, but because we perceive each of them as direct functions of those which have preceded. ("To Understand Music," 17)
This idea that musical events are shaped and even constituted by their musical contexts is extremely important, and is a premise of my theoretic approach.
That Wolpe identifies musical form with the temporal process of content is not in itself a particularly distinctive point of view. Heinrich Schenker, for example, also equated form with content. (4) But many of Wolpe's ideas about form expressed in his writings and music do challenge and even overturn aspects of form in tonal practice too often presumed to generalize beyond the repertoire in which they developed. Two common assumptions involve the relationship between units of form and time: that units of form must be temporally discrete, and that they must be temporally adjacent to combine into larger units. These conjoin as prerequisites to a third common assumption: that musical form denotes a well-formed hierarchy of inclusion relations among parts, as in 19th-century Formenlehre and Schenkerian theory alike. An additional, related and often hidden assumption about musical form inherited from tonal contexts is that form is necessarily teleological, purposefully directed toward a climax, return, or final resolution.
Wolpe overturns all of these common assumptions about musical form to predicate his form-sense on simultaneity rather than succession, associative heterarchies rather than hierarchy, and fortuitous coincidence or juxtaposition rather than teleology. In the "Lecture on Dada," he says:
The concept of simultaneities is one of the most truly fascinating things. Today it is a workable element, a concrete element you work with, like a drill or a hose. It is a tool. It means what repeatedly happens anyway, what happens in a street situation, what happens on a canvas, what happens to every six, seven, twenty people of different trends, [who] find themselves at a moment of junction. What I call the panorama of activities, where, within certain confinements, spatial confinements certain things absolutely opposed, absolutely dissociated, that have nothing to do with each other, are brought together. ("Lecture on Dada," 210)
For aspects of a single idea, this second, more interesting, sense of simultaneity is closely related to multidimensionality: it amounts to recognition of the musical object as multidimensional, and on two levels. First, it is a property of musical space transferred to the objects that reside there: musical objects form not in one musical dimension at a time (pitch, time, loudness, etc.), but in many dimensions at once. So each "object" is actually a simultaneity of characteristics and potentials, described in many--often functionally independent--dimensions. Second, multidimensionality engages musical objects as holistic entities, exposing different aspects over time. At this level, the idea is no longer comprised of dimensions--it has "dimensions," aspects heard successively but recognized as parts of one thing. Remarkably, Wolpe locates the synthesis of aspects that constitutes the object not outside or among these aspects, but within how we perceive them, positing a dense perception or "experience of den sity involving multiple aspects of the same thing" ("Lecture on Dada," 212). (5) For Wolpe, "The object exists always in a state of simultaneity. Simultaneity means that it really comprises all levels at any given moment" (Wolpe 1999, 402).
When the object is a simultaneity, each time-slice becomes a coincidence of events, and each "event" a nexus among moments or musical segments. These need not be temporally adjacent or proximate, but may be dispersed throughout a composition, with profound implications for musical organization over longer temporal spans. In "Thinking Twice," Wolpe epigrammatically asks, "Who is going to rule over the sequences of a hundred released simultaneities?" ("Thinking Twice," 306). As object-recognition gathers these moments into significant formal structures, it implies a view of form that is non-sequential and non-hierarchic. Again, Wolpe:
. . . the same thing can exist under a variety of conditions, as we can exist under a variety of conditions-- only that we bring this into one focus. . . . one revises the concept of sequences. Sequence didn't exist, because each instance of the sequence had to share with all other instances of other sequences at the same time. So what you had virtually was nothing but multiple instances knotted together. ("Lecture on Dada," 210-1)
Multiple instances knotted together. That is the crux of the issue: it suggests that for Wolpe's music (and much other contemporary music as well), the concept of form requires a radical rethinking. Form is not schema, not one privileged, best-nested, view of the web of relationships. But nor does it evaporate into the totality of events in a composition. For Wolpe's music, form involves discernible musical objects, knotty webs of relation, and the possibility that listeners and analysts might navigate through these webs in many ways. (6) The challenge to music theorists is to find a way to understand and model form in these terms.
Without sequence, without hierarchy, what becomes of teleology? Not surprisingly, Wolpe abandons teleology as an aesthetic principle, and instead adopts a position that revels in the depth and breadth of the moment as simultaneity and the propulsive energy created by fortuitous coincidence or juxtaposition among moments. From the "Lecture on Dada":
. . . you have in this kind of music . . . the concept of unforseeability, non-influence, non-directivity, you cannot explain. It means you cannot infer what is going to happen. That means that every moment events are so freshly invented, so newly born, that it has almost no history in the piece itself but its own actual presence. It has its presence, its now situation, and then the now situation is joined with another, with the next now-- an unfoldment of nows! ("Lecture on Dada," 213-4)
Temporal process is no longer a play of expectations formed by a directed sequence of events that resonate with theoretic implications outside the piece, but the locus of attention in the particularity of events and their associations or fortuitous relations with one another. Where parts of the web of association are stronger or weaker, or seem to gravitate toward one moment through changing strengths of association realized in sequential time, one might indeed construe or construct a kind of teleology. But it is important to recognize that this is not teleology in the standard sense: rather, it is specific to a set of associations, their temporal disposition, and a certain analytical perspective. In Wolpe's music, one can only identify the goal, or even the direction, of such teleologies through the music itself.
The five aspects of musical form we have considered so far--form as the process of content, temporal disjunction, temporal adjacency, their combination to produce hierarchy, and teleology--have something important in common: they all approach musical form explicitly as it unfolds in time. Where traditional views of musical form focus on the sequence of discrete events in a single, linear, time, Wolpe's writings suggest a spatial concept with extension in multiple dimensions, inspired by his contact with visual artists in the Bauhaus, Dada, and later the New York School. (7) Three basic and more overtly spatial principles of formal construction recur throughout his writings: symmetry, asymmetry, and opposition. (8)
Symmetry and asymmetry are complementary instances of Wolpe's "proportions," basic perceptual categories appropriate to both music and the visual arts. (9) Symmetry amounts to equivalence under transformation. In painting, the transformation is rotation either within a plane, or translation or inversion about an axis within the plane; in music, it appears as reflection around an axis in the linear dimensions of pitch and time. Symmetries by pitch inversion and temporal retrograde are extremely common in Wolpe's music as they are in Webern's, with whom Wolpe studied for three months in 1933 (Wolpe 1999, 380). Wolpe's interest in symmetries and asymmetries as musical proportions also intersects with concepts of visual balance and basic forms explored by Bauhaus artists. In Wolpe's late music, symmetries become a characteristic organic mode or habit and might well be seen as an anchor for his other ideas about form. The equivalence that associates parts of a symmetry defines a musical moment, a clear and cognit ively distinct "now" that may be one aspect of a simultaneity, or a premise for opposition in "an unfoldment of nows."
On asymmetry, Wolpe writes: "Asymmetry is not born in sleep....This means that symmetrical midpoint formations, too, are necessary means to stir up quantities" ("On Proportions," 170). Whether this is a statement about compositional practice or about perception, it suggests that the route to asymmetry is indirect; symmetry is prerequisite. Symmetry and asymmetry might be seen as figure and ground; the equivalence that associates parts of a symmetry can serve as the basis for modeling asymmetry, subject to inclusion relations that indicate added or missing elements. Where transformational equivalence between parts of a symmetry renders it closed and static, asymmetry opens; it is kinetically charged. Wolpe's phrase "the asymmetrical tug of groups" ("On Proportions," 148) suggests the force of cognitive dissonance between an inferred symmetry and the actual asymmetry presented. (20)
Depending on musical context, asymmetry may sound like a skewed symmetry or an incomplete one. Two common ways asymmetries arise in Wolpe's music are through shifting axes of symmetry and by superimposing two or more symmetries. Wolpe notes that superimposed symmetries have an interesting perceptual effect: "With the abundance of increasing symmetrical nestings, the clear perception of symmetrical structures in a particular region as symmetrical correspondences within the total region diminishes, in favor of a tightly condensed and completely centralized mass sound" ("On Proportions," 140). A third technique involves change in one dimension (e.g., note values) superimposed on strict symmetry in another (e.g., pitch retrograde). On the variety of means to asymmetry and their implications for larger-level organization, Wolpe muses: "Perhaps there is no hierarchy in the succession of asymmetrical occurrences. Who, rather than counting on variety, would catalogue cloud...
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