Approaching Musical Actions
John Rahn · Perspectives of New Music · 2007
Approaching Musical Actions -? ? John Rahn So, an improvisation has been going on for some time, but its impetus is dying out, at first in a good way, all getting more quiet in a nice contrast to what has gone before, but soon, in fact now, we need a new idea, of course (inescapably) related towhat we have been playing already, but one thatwill have a fresh effect and that can carry us into a fertile territory thatwill in some way complement what has gone before. I gather up into my mind and intuition some threads that have been woven into everything else so far, and form a tentative image of some new pattern to weave, and I act. The act is the public manifestation of my inner representation of my projection of the music we have played onto the screen of the future.The other musicians respond to this new musical context with their own representations, projections and actions, in a spreading web of new musical relations, represented individually and to some extent variously in each musician, and manifested publicly in our shared acoustic space, which serves as our blackboard?the space in which we communicate to each other. 58 PerspectivesofNew Music Is the picture so different for a composer? She is sitting in a room. Nice treeswave in the breeze outside. She isdigesting her breakfast egg over a cup of coffee. On her desk is a pile of pages of musical score, some 128 pages of her new piece for orchestra. She ishalf-way through the second of three large sections in the piece. She runs through the piece so far composed in her mind, pausing here and there to chew over some bit or other and revise her mental representation ofthe flow ofthe piece. She tries to form an image of a good way to continue furtheron into her second section. She sees the glimmer of an idea. But, itwon't work after all that loudness 30 measures earlier. She puts down her coffee and acts: she erases the brass from a 20-bar stretch, leaving only the strings. She sketches in an oboe part in the blank score. . . . I have referred in an earlier paper to this "wildfire of the musical swerve and flow" as "a sort of playful path in time through a field of temporally invariant relations."1 David Lewin's point of departure for the development of his transformational networks was that "since 'music' is something you do, and not just something you perceive (or understand), a theory ofmusic can not be developed fullyfrom a theory ofmusical perception."2 And again, Lewin says: "'If I am at s and wish to get to t,what characteristic gesture . . . should I perform in order to arrive there?' The question generalizes: 'If I want to change Gestalt 1 into Gestalt 2 . . . , what sorts of admissible transformations in my space . . .will do the best job?' This attitude is . . . the attitude of someone inside the music, as idealized dancer and/or singer. No external observer (analyst, listener) isneeded."3 Lewin's formulation talks about changing Gestalt 1 into Gestalt 2. Recent practice of transformational theory has focused on networks of pitch classes, the so-called Klumpenhouwer networks, or Knets, which themselves only transform individual pitch classes into other ones, and on the isographies that can obtain between such networks. The isogra phies are, typically,used analytically in a rather static fashion to associate small stretches of music represented as networks of a few pc, much as a traditional motivic analysis would associate two small motives which bear some resemblance to each other. We could quibble with Lewin's basic formulation, too, as taking some given (or found) thing and changing it into some other like thing. It seems altogether too focused on things. Itmay be an advance to think, as Lewin does, in terms of the transformation from one thing to the other, but the underlying granulation is rather grating. We want to think of music as growing. The thingness of music might lie in the magic metamorphosis from one thing, the music up to now as repre sented mentally and realized acoustically and in the score by acts...