Cultivating an Air: Natural Imagery and Music Making

CULTIVATING AN AIR: NATURAL IMAGERY AND MUSIC MAKING ANDREW MEAD USIC MAKING HAS OFTEN BEEN DESCRIBED using imagery drawn from nature.* Such an approach can be very compelling: the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can readily be conceived as growing from the seed of its initial motive. Various writers have noted that Heinrich Schenker’s theories of tonal music draw deeply on notions of organicism, derived from his understanding of the philosophy and biology of his day.1 But images and arguments drawn from nature have also been used to circumscribe what music can or should be, as, for example, in those claims that the twelve-tone system is “unnatural,” * The following was first presented on the occasion of the premiere of Robert Morris’s SOUND/PATH/FIELD at Syracuse University on September 24, 2006 as part of a symposium on music and nature. It is offered here as a salutation to and celebration of Robert Morris on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. (See also endnote 18.) M 92 Perspectives of New Music or somehow at odds with the workings of human cognition. Cognitive theories of music too often use conceptions of what the human mind supposedly can or cannot do to critique bodies of music, as opposed to asking what their fans find attractive about them and using that as a starting point.2 In what follows, I want to challenge the use of natural imagery as musical gatekeeper by questioning the placement of the metaphorical connection between music and the natural world. In the process I will offer an alternative source for natural imagery to describe music, drawn in part from the practice of evolutionary biology, along with some illustrations of how this alternative framework of metaphors may contribute to our musical pleasure and understanding. In challenging the use of the “natural” versus “unnatural” divide as a musical evaluative, I want to start with a simple problem: the misconstrual of some given musical act and the resulting critique of what is in fact a bad description of what we are supposed to gain from that act. To use a well known example, for many years the standard claim was that the retrograde-inversion relation in music based on ordered segments was “unhearable,” being too abstract or too distant from the original. By using the operator names as the basis of such a critique, one misses what is actually accomplished: the sequence of directed interval classes of the initial string is reversed. As Babbitt and others have pointed out, retrograding a series of intervals can be a very powerful relation, especially if the directed interval classes are realized as actual pitch intervals, as Schoenberg often does when writing melodies derived from a concatenation of row forms related by RI. The results can be remarkably easy to hear, as Example 1 illustrates with the opening melody of the Piano Concerto, op. 42. Another example of how one can reframe a supposedly “unhearable” relation to render it not only hearable but palpable can be found in the use of complex polyrhythms in music by Elliott Carter and others. EXAMPLE 1: RETROGRADE OF PITCH INTERVALS UNDER RI BETWEEN ROWS IN SCHOENBERG, PIANO CONCERTO OP. 42, PIANO SOLO, MM. 4–12, REPETITIONS REMOVED
P: hex. 2 +5 -4 +2 +8 -3 +8 +2 -4 +5 RTEIP:hex. 1               Cultivating an Air: Natural Imagery and Music Making 93 Many of Carter’s works since 1980 or so use large-scale polyrhythms that span a composition. Once again, it might be questioned whether it is possible to hear the slow unfolding of 45:56 in his Enchanted Preludes, or 216:75 in Night Fantasies. But if we understand the underlying polyrhythms as grids that constrain where tempo changes may be made, and what those tempi might be, we can hear them as controllers of large-scale form in his work, without the necessity of counting out the actual numbers. Even shorter polyrhythms can be misconstrued: one might validly question whether or not a listener can take in a polyrhythm of 15:16, but if one can think of the realization of such a polyrhythm in a framework of beats and subdivisions, it...