Time's Department Store: A Polyphonic Score for Reading

TIMOTHY MC CRACKEN Time's Department Store: A Polyphonic Score for Reading ON MUSIC 'You are the vibrating instrument ...' Nancy Cox, Mixed Voices (85) ,Seeing is believing and hearing is a bitch.' Xam Cartier (42) '... body immediate and true, I living in the movement's only moment, I the moment the poem is for, / still and moving in the music's eye: Emile Buchwald , Mixed (173) 'Music pours over the sense / and in a funny way / music sees more than r. /1 mean it remembers You have been invited to write on knowing; specifically the discovery/ invention problem of musical knowing. Even though you are working with time, you must begin with this visual problem : how can you introduce the time of music only within a space? Your desk is a working metaphor for the promises and problems at hand. Straight ahead is your computer screen. The impatient cursor blinks on the empty blue field. You must etch in here what others will see. More questions emerge from the visual: are you discovering a hidden truth waiting in the circuits? Or will you be making a new truth? Or is all knowing a polyphonic theft, a fresh composition yet one tapped into the grammar of experience? To the right of your computer is a teetering crescendo of underscored books on music, filled with the appropriate and appropriated words of others. What you have read on music, however, has followed this century's tonal revolutions ; there has not been a gathering around a tonal centre, but a multivoiced dispersing outward. So this right margin will be counterpointed new and old quotations on music. Perhaps, it might help if you decide what music to play. To your left is a small portable stereo which can provide the music for ... Well, this is a most important question: what is music for? ABOUT MUSIC 'Thanks to music we are able to behold time.' Victor Zuckerkandl (261) 'For the perceiving subject who sees is situated and placed within a set of clarities and distinctions , but the perceiving subject who hears is placed within a set of obscurities.' Kevin Barry (SO) 'Postmodernism is a process of making the producti it is dispersal that needs centering in order to be dispersal ... it is immanence denying yet yearning for transcendence .' Linda Hutcheon (49) 'Proposition: a piece of music as the sum of musical objects, unrelated to each other, apart from one's UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1992 better.' Anne Sexton, Mixed (156) 'Cage wrote 4'33 I with only one instruction - tacet. He says music I is silence plus random sounds I that might intrude.' Lin Max, Mixed (107) 'Golden Age trance, when New Orleans stations / Traveling two thousand miles shaped distance / into alchemy. Beneath the door, a light from the hall / Bathing the bedroom in its stammering glow: / Cooke and Redding risen, James Brown quaking at the Apollo.' David Wojahn, Homage 490 TIMOTHY MC CRACKEN What does music do? You will need help from musicians, poets, and writers with this. That is why, next to the stereo, stacked near tapes and compact discs, are novels, stories, and poems. So this left margin can serve as the voices of music. But what about the centre, the still point of this noisy polyphony? Music exits between silence and noise; or rather it is silence and noise sounded together. Of silence, you need only be silent, Cage taught you that. So perhaps to understand music you have to understand noise. So the centre will be a demi-narrative , surrounded by silence, pierced by noise. Yet even noise has a pattern. Jacques AttaH's Noise: The Political Economy of Music is a deorchestration of music's discovery/invention problem. Attali listens very carefully to noise and deconstructs the history of musical development in four stages: (1) sacrifice; (2) representation; (3) repetition; . and (4) composition. Our hero will re-enact this pattern. Here is our hero. Imagine a man at and on the edge. Put him in the most simple, most ordinary, and therefore most terrible act of deciding what recordings he is about to purchase. He was a Catholic and is catholic: he fondly remembers rock...