An Analytical Example for Bob

AN ANALYTICAL EXAMPLE FOR BOB JOSEPH N. STRAUS N THE FALL OF 1981, I was the greenest, most naïve young music theorist you can possibly imagine. The ink on my doctoral diploma was still wet, and I had just started my first job, at the University of Wisconsin. It was a simpler, less demanding time for music theorists: I had never attended a conference, much less presented at one. But I found myself at the 1981 meeting of the newly formed Society for Music Theory in Los Angeles, giving my first-ever theory paper. I recognized Milton Babbitt, the keynote speaker for the conference, sitting right in front of me, in the first row. Seated next to him was an imposing, large man with a bushy, white beard (Bob Morris, as it turned out, but I didn’t know that at the time—I told you I was green). When my paper ended, the imposing, large man with the bushy, white beard asked me a question. I didn’t know much at that time, but I knew enough to know that I didn’t know exactly what I was being asked. When the question ended, Babbitt piped up, “Quite right, Bob!”—and I knew I was in big trouble. I muddled through an I An Analytical Example for Bob 163 answer, as people who are out of their league often do, but that was the moment when I began to learn from Bob Morris, and that process has never stopped since. I don’t believe I’ve written a music theory article in the past twenty-five years that didn’t cite Bob and draw on his thinking in some significant way. For someone with intellectual hunger, Bob’s work has provided an endless feast. I want to give one current example of how my work has drawn on his. Bob’s well-known article on “voice-leading spaces” has been an important source of stimulation for me (Morris 1998). It is right at the core of all of my own work on atonal voice leading; I have read it many times and assigned it to generations of students. There’s an idea in there that Bob deals with mostly in passing, something he calls “total voice leading”: “Given two pcsets A and B, the total voice-leading from A to B includes any and all moves from any pcs of A to any pcs of B— that is, all the ways one can associate the pcs of A with those of B” (178). I had never paid much attention to that idea—the article is full of other fascinating things—but it recently occurred to me that that there was significant intersection between Bob’s “total voice leading” and Lewin’s IFUNC, and that both offered ways of talking systematically about all of the intervals formed between pcsets A and B and for thinking of that total intervallic package as a sort of voice leading.1 I began to realize that you can gather the package of intervals formed between pcsets A and B into a multiset and think usefully about its properties. These interval-multisets can be related by transposition and inversion as members of an imultiset-class. When we talk about the transposition or inversion of an imultiset, we’re really talking about the intervals between the intervals, or the indexes of inversion that relate the intervals. In other words, we’re talking about hyper-T and hyper-I, very much in the sense those terms are used in discussions of Klumpenhouwer networks, and with similar possibilities for recursion. Furthermore, it turns out that these imultisets all have Cohn’s TC (transpositional combination) property, and that many of them can be generated by more than one pair of set-classes A and B, something Cohn refers to as “multiple parentage” (see Cohn 1988 and 1991). Example 1 illustrates some of these points with reference to two four-note segments in the opening melody of “Linee,” one of Bob’s Fourteen Little Piano Pieces (2002). These two segments, Gb-E-D-Db and C-A-Ab-G, are expressed as RI-related contour-segments, and...