Music and Oulipo

October 10 7:30 at Loft393

there will a preview of Trevor Bača-Paul Griffiths’ when the time comes featuring actress Nancy Robinette, director Joy Zinoman and Cygnus. This project is a first in theater, where the musicians as musicians are equal presences on stage wtih the actor.

Nancy Robinette is mentioned HERE.

Harmon too often fails to make his characters into anything other than animated position papers. Only in scenes with the incredible Robinette, who gives the self-deluding, hopeful Irma a dozen delicate gradations, does Harmon’s work create a beautifully rendered illusion of reality. – The New Yorker

Paul Griffiths said somewhere, something like,

“Literature can learn from music.”

I cannot make an exhaustive study. I would love to see one.

I am moved at the moment to show how what Griffiths does can model what music can do to. That modelling can help the non-musician understand music and it could inspire young composers to keep some traditions alive.

Analogies cannot be perfect. But some imperfect analogies might provide a way into some musical ideas without having to talk in opaque musical terms. I will try to sequester all technical discussions in a bubble.

In short, what Griffiths’ Oulipian quiddity in his *let me tell you* does with words, music can do in endless ways. *let me tell you* is in Ophelian, employing only the words spoken by Ophelia in Hamlet. Ophelian colors the text in a global way and specific ways. Globally – any way you choose to characterize it – [ Me: globally, something dies from the muddleheaded confusion of the transition out of the warrior ethos. ] And locally, any passage is colored by presences and absences of words in this bizarre Oulipian universe wherein we ask ourselves why some words exists and not others; how does that relate to the global quiddity?.

First, some bullet points — observations and experiences of the relationship between music and text, mostly trivial.

1 –a passage of music revolves around a note; a passage of text revolves around a word.

2—a scale of foregrounding events –

dissonances, greater and lesser
adjectives, greater and lesser — upset — distraught — incapacitated

In both Bach and Telemann there can be found Hindemian hierarchies of events that jump out — different magentas and electric greens that jump out of the picture.

Appoggiaturas

4-3 —> 4-3/9-8 (double appogiatura)—>—>appoggiaturas with chromaticisms—>appoggiaturas with non-diatonic harmonies (V(no root)b9/1)—>appoggiaturas with enharmonic voice leading—>cadential 6/4 (I agree with Boulanger —usage makes it powerful)

Beethoven Diabelli Variations

3–

pacing

4—

Thanks to Kevin Korsyn for this —

For setting text, Brahms mentions cadences coinciding with punctuation of the text. This is so important, but cadences are not what they were in Brahms’ day. What Babbitts and Boykans were up to was preserving such, honoring such, but accomplishing them in new ways.

4—

A passage of music treats a theme.

A passage of literature treats a theme.

rhetoric, syntax, semantics

These are scholastic, and I’ll paraphrase an early music person Mark Rimple — “Bach knew the Medieval, scholastic mind.” I add that Bach knew, through Jacob Boehm, the photo-naturalist mind emerging from Avicenna/Aquinas/Maimonides via Spinoza.

I quote Mario Davidovsky, “it’s as if there is no concern at all with syntax and semantics”. He was talking about where music was going toward the end of his life. Perhaps the focus now, in some quarters, is on noise and pitch and traversing between them, on new spectral colors; on new microtonal colors. And with a push into new territory things might get lost, but only momentarily.

That’s a scant list and I need help improving it, but I’m moving on now to a more surprising analogy. We have to thank Paul Griffiths for this. He is the first Oulipian to be immersed in music.

let me tell you is his novel in Ophelian. Ophelian is the language consisting of all the words spoken by Ophelia, and no others. This is a radical quiddity that is really not often found outside of music. It colors the entire work.

I try to make a few musical analogies. More will come —

1—Neoplatonic

In the neoplatonic ethos, unifying microcosm & macrocosm imbue an entire work with that quiddity. I have always thought of it as cosmic.

But it also just happens to make for interesting music.

Bach’s binary forms are of this cosmic order. What happens on the larger scale is echoed on the small scale.

Macrocosmic A section

Big I to Big V |||||

B section

Big V to Big I

Microcosmic

Details of the progress from I to V in the A section are inverted in the B section to go from V to I.

Color can be imbricated into this order. BWV995 – the minor major 7th in the A section, opening the Saraband and embedded in Bouree #1, appeared inverted at the end of the Gigue. The gigue ends with an augmented major 7th chord, just before the cadence.

Wuorinen and Dawe’s nesting is another global quiddity. Small & big are the same – fractal naturalism.

2—Schoenberg op. 9

I was doing Syringa under the baton of Claire Heldrich with her New Music Consort. That was my first meeting with Carter. Claire said each section was like entering a room with a distinctive atmosphere and lighting. I appreciated that and now I see how it might remind us of Ophelian.

Schoneberg’s op. 9 is a paradigmatic example of this.

Opening 4ths

Developing all the interval cycles aiming at

Middle section in the “key of 4ths”

Bach’s passage in the A section of his Allemande from BWV 996 is colored with major 7th chords.

In Brahms op. 88, the sarabande that he carried around for years as a sketch colors a passage in the “key” of major 7th chord. And in this case, the coloring honors the neoplatonic quiddity, it is stated from the outset and grows.

Keys of F, A, C# — the roots of those chords with the roots of their V chords creates the background augmented scale of the piece. .

The opening theme is

C - - F E - F G A Bb C A

That is, C E F, with the A decorated.

Babbitt guts his rows and later guts his array to go Webernian. If Babbitt went Webernian with 015s and 045s, that is precisely analogous to Bach going major7.

From the Bach example to the Brahms example to the Schoneberg example to the Carter and Babbitt examples is a ripening and a flowering of something indispensable for me.

Finally, the moment a color is displaced by another is meaningful and memorable.

I am sad to notice how the final, crucial points I’m making are all in the technical boxes.

And so I have to thank Paul Griffiths for making an analogy that can be understood without using technical terms.

Composers can do what Griffiths does when he writes in Ophelian. Major or minor worked well, and that palette was extended – sections colored by a specific chord quality.