Music Analysis as Poetry
Hyunree Cho · Perspectives of New Music · 2015
MUSIC ANALYSIS AS POETRY 1 HYUNREE CHO . . . in the deepest of the synaptic fissures, in the hiatuses, intervals and meantimes of a nonobjectifiable brain, in a place where to go in search of them will be to create. —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? ET’S ASSUME THAT THE ACT of analyzing a piece of music is not that of representation. Let’s suppose that the analyst begins her work just like a sculptor examines a stone that has only just been delivered to his atelier. The analyst’s chosen piece of music is the sculptor’s matter: the raw marble that holds and releases forms. It must be a painstaking labor to struggle with such a hard, unyielding matter, but she knows that analyses would be powerless without such a struggle. Trainings and experiences will guide her in grasping and transforming various signs that her material may emit, but won’t guarantee the success of her work. There is something wild in the very nature of her work, something not quite educable. Hence music analysis will always remain “a potentially boundless activity” (Agawu 1992, 13) constantly haunted by anxiety, breakthroughs, and glee. Will it or won’t it? The metaphor of a sculptor standing in front of a fresh piece of stone will remain central throughout this essay, but it was none other L 144 Perspectives of New Music than the music theorist David Lewin (1933–2003) who thought seriously on such a direct, unmediated relationship between intelligence and matter within the peculiar practice called academic music analysis. Noting the wide divide between the two types of musical practices—composition and analysis—presumed in earlier theories of musical perception, Lewin, in the opening of his 1986 essay “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,” wrote: “The theories can be modified, I believe, to allow a more universal stance that also regards acts of analytic reading/listening as poetry” (Lewin 1986, 327). His rationale for this argument was, however, not so much that analysis also has some creative aspect—there is no telling how Lewin would have thought of the idea of “creative music analysis”—as that perception is a general feature of any music-related human activity. As perceivers, rather than as processors, both composers and listeners have equal membership rights to the poets’ club. The publication of the 1986 essay—now more often called the “Phenomenology” essay among music theorists—closely precedes that of Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations (hence GMIT) in 1987. Of the two works, GMIT is considered the most seminal text of musical transformational theory, written in the clear and distinct language of mathematicians, while the 1986 essay remains a stillcontroversial piece of methodological critique, a bit loosely organized and more spontaneously crafted in terms of the purpose and the range of topics. Could we say that GMIT provided a progressive and definitive resolution to the issues raised in the 1986 essay? Or, are they just two very different works by the same author? In either case, one thing clearly at stake in both of the works is the deep-rooted Platonic hierarchy between an original text (e.g., a piece of music as an autonomous artwork) and its transformed counterpart (e.g., a piece of music analysis as a representation of the music). Pointing to the classical division of labor between the creator and the interpreter , Lewin writes in the 1986 essay: “The former genus [composer/ performer/playwright/actor/director/poet] may be held to be perceiving in the creative act, and some influential contemporary literary theories actually prefer members of this genus to those of the other [listener/reader] as perceivers” (Lewin 1986, 327; italics original). In GMIT, he writes: “[The transformational attitude] is by and large the attitude of someone inside the music, as idealized dancer and/or singer. No external observer (analyst, listener) is needed” (GMIT, 159). What is being asserted is not just some collaboration but something more like a mutual immanence or deterritorialization between perception and creation. Music Analysis as Poetry 145 We shall soon see how this fusion of categories has (and could have) affected and transformed the discipline of music analysis. In doing so, it...