A Sonorous Image of Time-Stretching in Birtwistle's "Harrison's Clocks"

A Sonorous Image of Time-Stretching in Birtwistle's Harrison's Clocks Alessandra Vojcic In a lecture delivered at Harvard University, Aaron Copland simply defined a sonorous image as "the way music sounds," or more broadly as the "auditory concept that floats in the mind of the executant or composer; a prethinking of the exact nature of the tones to be produced" (Copland 1952, 21). The emphasis in Copland's definition was on the sonorous element of tones, elsewhere in the lecture described by the composer as a combination of tone colors with their acoustical properties appropriately adjusted to varied environ ments. Copland did suggest at the beginning of his lecture that a composer's aim at effectiveness and intelligibility of his musical design is such that the final product is not mere paper music, but his definition of the sonorous image remained forcibly timbrai. Perspectives of New Music Thirty years later, a different type of sonorous image is evoked by Robin Holloway in his discussion of Wagner's Parsifal: "a central complex of metaphor[s] expresses at once the story and the character whose story it is, and the broader subject-matter that lies within character and event; all this is caught or borne by the music, everything fuses together into an indivisible whole" (Holloway 2004, 53). In contrast to Copland, Holloway focuses on the sonorous image as a metaphor. In his reading, an amalgam of revisited and reinter preted leitmotives represents the fulcrum as well as the initial assertion of all musical content in Parsifal, and he goes on to further state that: "there is nothing like it in any other composer" (Halloway, 53). While Wagner's music remains recognizable and unique in many ways, the use of a central complex of metaphors in a musical work, and the merging of independent entities to form a new meaning, is probably not unique. Hatten 2004 has demonstrated such "sonorous imagery" in an earlier repertoire, and I will discuss a comparable occurrence in a work contemporaneous with Holloway's statement. Susanne Langer's definition of the sonorous image, written a mere one year later than that of Copland, is one of a musical illusion where a "sonorous image of a passage, [is] abstracted from actuality to become free and plastic and entirely perceptible" (Langer 1953, 112-13). The remarkable difference is one of context, rather than definition—Langer is discussing time, not timbre, nor pitch-based motivic content. Elliott Carter quoted Langer at some length, looking to her for assistance in unraveling different categories of temporal organization and perception, and adopted Langer's contrast of experiential versus clock time (Carter, 1976). Langer extends her metaphor of illusion beyond the primary medium, that of the experiential time, to the realm of "space" in music: as music creates an illusion of movement, the movement is perceived as unfolding through a space that is intrinsically derived from the temporal realm (Langer, 117). It appears that, as a natural conflation of Langer's two media, those of time and space, time-space emerges as more than a simple sum of two illusions. Driven by a performer-biased concern for rhythm and form in post-tonal repertory, I set out to explore the sonorous imagery of time-space, or the manner in which a temporal process can unfold within and define a single piece of music. Within the broad field of music, time itself is subject to manifold understanding: the objective "clock time" is the one we "measure" with instruments devised for visual observation (clocks, chronometers, metronomes), while the experiential time, as a subjective entity, often becomes the topic of musical discourse and interpretation. It is Time-Stretching in Birtwistle's Harrison's Clocks 7 noteworthy that there seems to be little disagreement about chronological (chronometric) or mathematical time, but there exists a plurality of categories for "chrono-ametric" time, sometimes differentiated as psychological time, musical time, the time of "pure duration," and likely many others.1 In short, the more "subjective" and experiential time becomes, the less we can agree what it is, and whether there is one or more kinds of chrono-ametric time.2 A two fold division into clock time and...