Yessum. They like their dense, opaque analyses in music too. When I first
came across a one hundred page analysis of Varèse's Density 21.5 -- a work
that occupies (I think) three pages of manuscript -- I thought it a bathetic
extreme. However, there is nothing to say that Varèse didn't expend 100
pages or more in the drafting, so there is no necessary correlation between
scale of completed work and scale of analysis. Nothing remarkable about that
after all, I guess.

Ay, the simplicity and the patternedness: all true. The melody, invented for
other purposes, is in a naïve Italian bel canto style. What struck me
though, on analysing it, was firstly how strongly implied the harmony is. No
one (I mean, most people familiar at least with Western pop, no matter their
level of musical expertise) would expect to hear it with a Bach chorale
harmonisation, for instance. Secondly, how the motivic kernel shifted from
weakest to stronger to strongest beat (in triple metre) to correlate with
and stress the implied harmony.

All of that leads to: anaphor! It's a curious thing, anaphor. Its rhetorical
meaning is apparantly the inverse of its grammatical meaning. Viz, in
rhetoric, anaphora is the term for a repetitive figure -- 

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, 
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

&c

In grammar, the presence of the figure replaced by its absence; it's the use
of a figure in place of another, usually longer, term, where full repetition
would be wearisome.

My idea is that all of this is bound up in the use of art objects in the
cultivation of 'good guessing' about the immediate environment -- not least
in reading the intentions of conspecifics.

Does that make any sense at all?

P

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to 
> poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On 
> Behalf Of Joanna Boulter
> Sent: 02 March 2007 23:01
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: theory comes after practice (was Constructivist 
> Poetics (which was Re: methadone))
> 
> Yer wha'?
> 
> I didn't do any philosophy of of music studies -- or at 
> least, we didn't call it that. I suppose it was a case of -- 
> Look, this works musically, and has been shown by wide 
> experience to do so; and if you want to do it differently, 
> you better be sure that works too.
> 
> Without actually seeing or hearing your self-penned simple 
> melody I couldn't really say. Though I'd be prepared to bet 
> it's diatonic, and in that case it has the weight of a whole 
> lot of musical tradition behind it, for starters.
> 
> I'd think it would be quite difficult, if not nearly 
> impossible, to write a simple melody that *didn't conform to 
> some sort of pattern. Otherwise, what you get is a 
> random-sounding series of notes. This may indeed be organised 
> according to some rational priniciple or other, but if it's 
> not a principle the *ordinary (not highly-trained or 
> exceptionally-talented) human ear has a chance of grasping, 
> then I'd say it's not entitled to be defined as melody. 
> The crucial aspect here is cadence. (If this is too naively 
> obvious, sorry!)
> 
> What conclusions did you come to, in the course of analysing 
> your specimen? 
> I'd be interested to see, bc if you think this is too far 
> away from an allowable "etc."
> 
> joanna
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peter Cudmore" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Friday, March 02, 2007 9:46 PM
> Subject: Re: theory comes after practice (was Constructivist 
> Poetics (which was Re: methadone))
> 
> 
> > 2nd attempt etc:
> >
> > Joanna, did you get to do structural harmony a la Schenker 
> & Salzer, 
> > or the kind of semiotic analysis that Nattiez does, in your 
> studies? I 
> > couldn't get a grip of it, myself, and couldn't really see that it 
> > might help my practice.
> >
> > What made the question strange for me (in the Brechtian 
> sense) arose 
> > while I was lately writing about Dennett's idea of 
> narrative gravity. 
> > I wanted to explain how a (self-penned) simple melody was rich with 
> > semiotic content, and found myself obliged to analyse the 
> specimen in 
> > a way that I wouldn't have had cause to do for any other reason.
> >
> > P
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry 
> >> and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Joanna 
> >> Boulter
> >> Sent: 02 March 2007 16:50
> >> To: [log in to unmask]
> >> Subject: Re: theory comes after practice (was 
> Constructivist Poetics 
> >> (which was Re: methadone))
> >>
> >> Yes, but surely they compose to quite a considerable extent in 
> >> accordance with (or indeed in defiance of) the methods 
> they absorbed 
> >> long ago when learning how to analyse the work of others. 
> There's no 
> >> need to think about form etc by then, unless they're deliberately 
> >> using a complex one for a particular purpose.
> >>
> >> joanna
> >>
> >> ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "Peter Cudmore" <[log in to unmask]>
> >> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> >> Sent: Friday, March 02, 2007 3:07 PM
> >> Subject: Re: theory comes after practice (was 
> Constructivist Poetics 
> >> (which was Re: methadone))
> >>
> >>
> >> > Here's Carl Dalhaus writing about the parallel case of music:
> >> >
> >> > "The esthetics of music is not popular. Musicians suspect
> >> it of being
> >> > abstract talk far removed from musical reality; the 
> musical public 
> >> > fears philosophical reflection of the kind one ought to
> >> leave to the
> >> > initiated, rather than plaguing one's own mind with unnecessary 
> >> > philosophical difficulties." (The Idea of Absolute Music, 1978)
> >> >
> >> > I was talking to a composer about this the other week, whether 
> >> > composers analyse their own music--that is, approach 
> their own work 
> >> > retrospectively using the same analytical methods they 
> apply to the 
> >> > music of others. He didn't in his own case, and thought not of 
> >> > others--confirming my intuition.
> >> >
> >> > P
>