Seminar Reflections

SEMINAR REFLECTIONS GARY W. DON But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”1 ONTEMPLATING JOHN RAHN’S PROFOUND INFLUENCE on my thinking and attempting to capture his influence in prose led to my own instance of writer’s block, and I decided to follow Hemingway’s advice. My one true sentence is that John Rahn’s seminars provided rich environments for me to create trajectories of thought that took me in unexpected and rewarding directions, and that continue to inform my work as a theorist and as a teacher. John had a knack for generating the feeling that the seminar topic was the most important topic in our lives at that time, and we created our own world surrounding that topic. We became disciples of Schenker in his seminar on tonal music, vigorously defending our graphs against the “misguided” graphs of our peers. Ernst Oster’s translation of Der freie Satz had recently been published, and it introduced me to Schenker’s way of thinking as well as his graphic methods. I continue to be struck by the wisdom in Schenker’s observation: C 244 Perspectives of New Music In the art of music, as in life, motion toward the goal encounters obstacles, reverses, disappointments, and involves great distances, detours, expansions, interpolations, and, in short, retardations of all kinds. Therein lies the source of all artistic delaying, from which the creative mind can derive content that is ever new. Thus we hear in the middleground and foreground an almost dramatic course of events.2 John expanded upon this observation with examples such as Mozart’s use of deceptive and half cadences in “Dove Sono” from The Marriage of Figaro to create ambiguity and to delay the ultimate arrival of scale degree 1 in the fundamental line, which inspired me to find other examples of artistic delay in works ranging from Bach Chorales through Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. I derived principles from these works that have become the cornerstone of my teaching of tonal music: details are important, ambiguity creates suspense and interest, and ambiguity followed by the expected resolution is more satisfying than the expected resolution without the ambiguity. Recognizing the subtle details in the play of ambiguity and resolution leads to rewards that repay us for all of the hard work that is necessary in order to become knowledgeable analysts, performers, and listeners. In his seminar on post-tonal music, John coined the term “pretty nested structure” to describe instances of intervals or set classes nested within larger-scale instances of the same interval or set class, thus creating large-scale structure. This concept set off a search for an undiscovered “PNS” that I could introduce in the next seminar class. John drew on the thema from Webern’s Symphonie Op. 21 as an example of local tritones between the clarinet line and the other instruments that are nested within the large-scale tritones of the clarinet line itself (Example 1).3 This example became part of his first analytical exercise in his book Basic Atonal Theory, and it was rewarding to know that our seminars had a formative role to play in his revisions of this work. There were always surprises lurking in John’s classes, and we were never sure what was going to happen on a given day. There was the time in John’s seminar on medieval music when he seemed to be channeling all of the cranky medieval theorists on the downfall of music, due to the introduction of musica ficta, the treatment of thirds as consonances, and other calamities. John lamented the replacement of the double leading tone cadence with the perfect authentic cadence, stated that the double leading...