The Musical "Culture of
Time and Space"
Craig
Cummings
The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918[1],
by Stephen Kern, is a study of the changes in individual and societal
perceptions of time and space in the years preceding and including World War I. Kern weaves an intricate fabric of ideas from
contemporaneous architects, artists, politicians, authors, scientists, and
philosophers. He concludes that the
impatient ultimatums of the July Crisis of 1914, leading from the assassination
of Archduke Ferdinand to the onset of the war, arose in part from a perception
of greatly accelerated time, fostered by new technologies such as the telephone
and telegraph. In addition, Kern asserts
that the conflict was in many ways a Cubist war:
The
psychological fragmentation experienced in no-man's-land during the war was but
one of a series of shattered forms - national boundaries, political systems,
social classes, family life, sexual relations, privacy, moral imperatives,
religious convictions, human sensibilities.[2]
Kern's multidimensional
fabric is somewhat threadbare in the area of music. This article extends some of his ideas by
relating them to music composed from 1900 to the present, and in addition it
concludes by connecting them with the hierarchy of musical time presented by
Jonathan D. Kramer.[3]
Kern's book has three
large divisions: time, space, and
matters related to World War I. Those
chapters concerning time include "The Nature of Time," "The
Past," "The Present," and "The Future," after which a
chapter on speed connects the sections on time and space. The chapters regarding space include
"The Nature of Space," "Form," "Distance," and
"Direction." Kern finishes his
book with "The Temporality of the July Crisis," "The Cubist
War," and a conclusion.
The first chapter
considers numerous ideas, including public versus private time, Einstein and
the theory of relativity, the relationship between the unconscious and time,
the debate over whether time is atomistic or a flux, and the potential
reversibility of time. This article
examines these topics and also notions of positive negative space and time in
connection with selected twentieth-century styles, composers, and pieces.
Kern initially presents
the ideas of public and private time by showing their relationships to the
telegraph, to precise military planning, and most especially to railroad
schedules, which began to be coordinated according to Greenwich time in the
year 1884. The private times of
individual railroad stops had become so diverse by the late nineteenth century
that some sort of coordination was necessary.
The standardized
public time established to align the schedules was adopted reluctantly at
first; Kern details the gradual process of acceptance and alignment and
demonstrates an increasing societal emphasis on public time and a corresponding
decline in both the quantity and quality of individual private times. Some of the contemporaneous art and
literature reveals a strong reaction against the authority of public time;
Joyce, Proust, and Kafka enter into private, individual temporal worlds in
Ulysses, Remembrance of Things
Past, and The
Trial. Public time is important in
some styles of twentieth-century music; however, there has been a concurrent revolt
against this standardization, and as a result the private times of individual
composers and works are of increased significance in comparison to those of
earlier generations.[4]
This article's examination of musical public
and private times begins with the Classical period. When temporal notions such as meter, rhythm,
and proportion are integral components of a stylistic norm, this norm might be
construed as representing the public time most characteristic of that
music. Upon examining the music of
Mozart, Haydn, early Beethoven, and other Classical composers, one sometimes
considers how the expansion, contraction, or elision of regular phrases creates
aberrations from normative four-bar phrases and eight-bar periods. In addition, the theorists at the time
demonstrated how one might go about doing this.
The alterations reflect a sort of "private time" evoked within
the composition, conflicting with the "public" expectation of
stylistic norms.
What is characterized
here as the public time of stylistic norms continues into nineteenth-century
music, where many compositions still exemplify the four- and eight-bar norms
and theorists advocate them as models for both analysis and composition. This musical public time becomes less
standardized in the later nineteenth century, particularly in the music of
Wagner and his followers, and it is overcome by the private times of individual
composers and styles in twentieth-century music. In addition to periodic structure, the public
time considered here is related to common-practice tonal harmony, the chromatic
domination and eventual collapse of which compelled composers to reconsider
both tonal and temporal systems.
One way in which
composers handled these decisions is by parodying public time, which may be
categorized several ways: 1) deliberate irony or sarcasm; 2) brief quotations
of earlier music; 3) quotation of an entire piece ("parody" in a
manner like the parody mass); and 4) style parody, in which composers combine
their ideas with some other (usually earlier) style.[5]
The ironic, sarcastic
type of parody is heard in works such as
Parade by Satie,
An American in Paris
by Gershwin, or multi-media events of Laurie
Anderson. The second type of parody,
brief quotations of earlier music, is used in numerous twentieth-century pieces
for a variety of reasons; just a few examples include the chorale sections from
Berg's
Violin
Concerto, Schoenberg's
Second String Quartet, Op.
10, movement II, and George Crumb's
Ancient
Voices of Children and
Black Angels.
Parody of an entire composition or parts thereof, where the composer adds private touches to a previously composed, public object, is exemplified in Lucas Foss' Baroque Variations and in Stravinsky's Pulcinella and Le Baiser de la Fée. Many twentieth-century works include style parody, in which composers borrow the public time of earlier styles and superimpose their own ideas onto it; examples of this final type of parody include portions of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, Berg's Wozzeck, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and Mass, and Bolcom's Ghost Rags.
What I am calling
musical public time still exists in much twentieth-century music. Works by relatively rhythmically conservative
composers such as Barber, Piston, Hanson, Persichetti, Rorem, Prokofiev,
Hindemith, and Copland sometimes maintain an easily ascertained rhythmic and
metric structure which evokes the public time of earlier stylistic
periods. Works whose times are
pre-compositionally determined, for example, multi-parametric serial works like
Babbitt's
Composition
for Four Instruments, exhibit public times if the
rhythmic structure is discernible. Jazz
and rock often exemplify yet another variety of public time in repetitive
patterns such as twelve-bar blues, improvisation over "I Got Rhythm"
changes, or stereotypical progressions such as I - vi - IV - V in 1950s rock
music. In addition, works which suggest
timelessness to the Western ear - especially early minimalist pieces - exist in
a non-teleological time which bears great similarities to public time
conceptions in non-Western regions of the world. Continuing with Leonard Meyer's terminology[6], it appears safe to conclude
that works which are less predictable and create and fulfill fewer expectations
would be of a more private nature and take longer to be assimilated in the
listener's mind than works in which a regular, stylistically predictable, more
public time creates implications which are recognizably realized or refuted.
"Private time"
in any work includes at least the temporal structure of the piece itself, that
of the performer, and especially the qualities of time imposed on the piece by
the listener. The temporal world of
music is particularly fascinating because a work generally is not just an
object, but a process through time which performers continually convey in
different ways. In addition, an
individual who reads a novel or views a work of art or sculpture has control
over the time spent assimilating the work and determining meaning, while the
time of most music moves forward regardless of the listener's level of
comprehension. Thomas Clifton writes:
The responsive listener does not create the composition, but he constitutes it as meaningful for him...it is the listener's composition which counts for him. In short, order is constituted a priori by the listener, not imposed by the composer.[7]
In
a sense, there are as many works as there are listeners - both "private time"
and experience differ for each listener, and sometimes change upon
rehearing. Who has not returned after a
period of some months or years to a Beethoven symphony or Bach fugue and heard
it in a new light, with a different view of the structure of the piece? At the other extreme, works for which time
should ideally be different upon rehearing, such as Cage's
Aria with Fontana Mix,
Stockhausen's
Klavierstück XI,
or Earle Brown's
Available
Forms I , become more predictable through repeated
listening to the same recording. The
process is complicated by the complexity of twentieth-century music, but the
phenomenal world of the individual listener obviously influences the perception
of any work.[8]
The prodigious variety of twentieth-century musical styles is intimately related to the numerous new ideas of the time. For example, Kern states that the late-nineteenth-century theories of the physicist Hendrick Lorentz "looked forward to relativity by suggesting that time measurements are modified by motion," and that "there is a plurality of 'local times,' each dependent on the relative motion of the clock and observer."[9] By 1916, Einstein had developed his theory of relativity to the point where "every reference body had its own particular time."[10] When Kern adds: "Einstein had filled the universe with clocks each telling a different correct time,"[11] the rejection of Newtonian absolute time and analogies to music become more obvious. Polyrhythmic works and other pieces with the stratification of independent lines lie close to this relativity, but the best connection is to music by Elliott Carter, in which different lines have their own tempos. In the Second String Quartet, each line has its own character and temporal quality, and it is possible to listen to one line relative to the others. Each instrument is an individual musical clock, telling its own correct musical time yet integrated into the whole. Other Carter works, for example the Third Quartet, also exemplify this relativistic quality.
Many of the works of
Ives conform to the paradigm of relativity, yet they also show some
relationship with the unconscious.
Freud's effort to penetrate the unconscious included experiments with
free association, which in turn are reflected in the stream-of-consciousness
literary style of the time, in works such as Joyce's
Ulysses. Music of this era also exhibits some aspects
of stream-of-consciousness; representative works include Debussy's
Jeux and
Soirées dans Granade
or, in a different vein, Ives'
Three
Places in New England and
Second Sonata for Violin and
Piano, II ("The Revival"). Ives' music is especially appropriate to this
analogy; his memories of town square concerts and parades are depicted in the
juxtaposition of familiar melodic fragments in a sort of
stream-of-consciousness style. In
addition, Ives' music reflects public and private times in a unique way, in
that his private memory and interpretation of events which transpired in a
public time are incorporated into his works.
Philosophers and scientists
working around the turn of the century argued about whether time was atomistic
or a flux. Those who found time to be
atomistic in nature cited Newton's calculus and even the mechanical ticks of
the clock. William James and Henry
Bergson were among those who argued for a flux.
James coined the term "stream-of-consciousness," endeavoring
to show continuous thought through this metaphor. Bergson defined his concept of "durée"
through numerous metaphors, including a melody in which the notes dissolved or
melted into one another. Impressionist
and Cubist painters responded to these ideas, attempting to convey motion or
the passage of time in works such as
Nude
Descending a Staircase by Duchamp.
Describing musical time
as atomistic or a flux is an even more difficult matter. The problem is related to hierarchy: just how small must an "atom"
be? How much music must occur before one
hears a series of atoms as a flux? The
individual notes in a melody do not literally dissolve into one another and
thus the melody might be characterized as atomistic. Further, a stereotypical eight-bar period
with antecedent and consequent phrases and a close on the tonic surely includes
some aspects of musical flux, yet if it is put into a larger context it may be
perceived as an atomistic closed unit.
Another view might hold that the motive is the atom from which music is
constructed. While these atomistic views
of musical time are plausible, the idea of a thematic gesture - or even
metaphors of musical motion such as Berry's reactive and anticipative impulses[12]
- present evidence of some sort of flux. In teaching theory and performance,
once students comprehend the fundamentals of harmony, rhythm, and melody, one
tries to discourage atomistic note-by-note interpretation, substituting notions
of musical growth and direction to encourage more global understanding. Different twentieth-century styles exemplify
varying points on an "atomistic-flux" continuum. The especially pointillistic works of Webern,
Varèse, Cage,
and others may sound atomistic, yet even they might be interpreted as points of
sound on a background flux of silence - a notion examined later in this
article. Works in which a quality of
timelessness is evoked - Stockhausen's
Stimmung, Terry Riley's Rainbow in Curved Air,
early minimalist works by Glass and Reich - could still be viewed as atomistic
in that individual notes and attacks create the seemingly timeless fabric. The notion of musical time in a flux,
however, is more compelling in this music, in which past, present, and future
are blurred and "vertical time" is created.[13]
It would appear that while painters were
trying to depict motion and avoid stasis, composers were (and still are)
striving for the opposite, endeavoring to negate impressions of forward-moving
time and musical motion.
The potential
reversibility of time was another
fin-de-siècle
topic of debate. Kern points out that
"the cinema portrayed a variety of temporal phenomena that played with the
uniformity and the irreversibility of time," and indicates that the first
attempt at running film backwards took place in 1895.[14]
Whether or not this is possible in music
depends in part upon the divisibility of musical and "clock"
times. If the two are separable, then
perhaps musical time may be reversed, even while clock time continues its
inexorable march forward. Deep listening
to reversed musical time is similar to deep viewing of reversed film: it may be possible to lose oneself in musical
(or film) time and experience its reversal, even if clock time moves
forward. It is undeniable that this
powerful metaphor seemed to draw composers into the attempt to implant
reversibility into their music. Webern's
palindromes, used in works such as
Symphonie,
Op. 21, II, and in
Piano
Variations, Op. 27, I, are good examples of this fascination
with the reversibility of time. A more
powerful example is the film music from Act II of Berg's opera
Lulu, which
combines the reversibility of time in film (or, action) and in the music,
resulting in a powerful impression of reversed time.
To sum up to this point,
ideas such as public time and private time, relativity, the unconscious, time
as atomistic or a flux, and the reversibility of time have been extracted from
Kern's book and have been examined in terms of how they may be reflected in
selected pieces or stylistic tendencies in twentieth-century music. Let us now examine how the concepts presented
are evident in two compositions from different decades and by different
composers: Stravinsky's
L'Histoire
du Soldat and Berio's
Sinfonia, III. Stravinsky's
L'Histoire du Soldat,
composed in 1918, is directly related to parodied public time in that he
borrows the public time of earlier styles and adds his own private touches to
it. The parody begins immediately in
"The Soldier's March," where the introductory three measures are an
ironic, distorted version of a "typical" march introduction. The ostinato which begins at m.4 commences
the public time of the march, onto which Stravinsky superimposes the private
time of the changing ideas and lines.[15] The
relativity of the individual lines and the juxtaposition of different ideas
create an image of multiple perspective similar to Picasso's paintings, yet the
ostinato provides an underlying unity of borrowed public time.
The "Three
Dances" exemplify a more straightforward style parody, borrowing the
"public time" of the tango, waltz, and ragtime, yet they all include
different private touches and surprises.
The surprise in the tango begins immediately, as the written downbeat
becomes an anacrusis when the stereotypical tango rhythm enters on beat two in
the percussion. Throughout the tango,
Stravinsky plays with the metric location of this pattern and with the distance
between reiterations of it, taking a public time idea (most typically a regular
two-measure unit, including a quarter rest after each statement) and altering
it. The waltz, more straightforward
metrically and rhythmically, borrows the meter and accompaniment of a typical
waltz, and here it is the pitch (particularly in the melody) which is the
private element. The irregular phrase
structure is temporally "private," as are the surprises at several of
the cadences (see the measures before rehearsal numbers 12 and 16). The ragtime, an early example of Stravinsky's
fascination with jazz, is furthest removed from its stylistic model,
juxtaposing sections which are rhythmically closer to the model (see rehearsal
numbers 24, 31, 33, and 36) against those which diverge from it (see rehearsal
numbers 27ff. and 34ff.).
Both "The Little
Chorale" and "The Great Chorale" are additional examples of
style parody. Here, Stravinsky pours new
wine (the sonorities, counterpoint, and instrumentation) into old bottles (the
borrowed public time of a chorale setting).
While the examples from
L'Histoire
exemplify style parody, the third movement of Luciano Berio's
Sinfonia
(1968) makes use of "public time" in a different way. Berio borrows the scherzo movement from
Mahler's
Second
Symphony, establishing underlying continuity while
portions of the text from Samuel Beckett's
The Unnamable, other text quotations,
and numerous musical quotations create extreme discontinuity.[16]
The combination of the Mahler and the
quotations results in a special kind of private time which evokes the
stream-of-consciousness: the abrupt juxtaposition of a variety of ideas and the
ephemeral, almost subconscious recall of numerous musical fragments related in
some way to the text. Berio writes:
Quotations
and references were chosen not only for their real but also for their potential
relation to Mahler. The juxtaposition of
contrasting elements... can also be considered... a documentary on an
objet trouvéJ
recorded in the mind of the listener... One might describe the relationship
between words and music as a kind of interpretation, almost a
Traumdeutung,
of that stream-of-consciousness-like flowing that is the most immediate
expressive character of Mahler's movement.
If I were to describe the presence of Mahler's "scherzo" in
Sinfonia,
the image that comes most spontaneously to mind is that of a river, going
through a constantly changing landscape, sometimes going underground and
emerging in another, altogether different, place...[17]
The movement is a
collage; Berio "assembles" the citations, expanding earlier
composers' ideas of overlap (see, for example, the finale of Act I of
Don Giovanni,
where Mozart overlaps ideas in several different meters). The resulting texture is the agglomeration of
the various lines and quotations; each of these lines has its own perceived
tempo and character, creating a kind of musical relativity comparable in some
ways to that of Elliott Carter discussed earlier.
The Stravinsky and Berio
examples have more in common than might initially appear. Both contain surface discontinuities and
non-developmental form (examples of "private time"), yet they also
have underlying continuity created by the parodied public time: the style parody in "The Soldier's
March," the three dances, and the chorales, and the parody of an entire
composition in the Berio. They also
exemplify the conflict between an atomistic conception of time and
time-as-flux: the atomism is created by
the juxtaposition of different ideas in the Stravinsky and by the numerous
disjointed quotations in the Berio. The
underlying flux in both works is created by the parodied public time: in the Stravinsky, it comes from the ostinato
in "The Soldier's March" and from the continuity in the three dances;
Berio conveys a flux by parodying Mahler.
Both compositions contain the relativity of different lines and
contrasting apparent meters, and both make interesting use of musical space,
especially in the registral deployment of the various lines and quotations. This article continues with a brief
digression about conceptions of space, followed by a concluding section
concerning silence in music.
Kern discusses specific
works where artists employ new conceptions of space, drawing upon such diverse
ideas as Jacob von Uexküll's
Umwelt
und Innenwelt der Tiere, Einstein's field theory, and
multiple perspective in painting. Von
Uexküll's
theory holds that each animal has its own surrounding world (Umwelt),
and that its response to this
Umwelt
creates its special inner world (Innenwelt). Higher animals are able to mirror objects and
spatial relations in the environment, and thus create a mirror or counterworld
(Gegenwelt). The worlds vary with each animal and
constitute different senses of space.[18]
J. T. Fraser has adapted these ideas into a hierarchical
theory of time which is discussed later in this article.
As explained by Kern,
Einstein's field theory disproved the idea that the electromagnetic field is to
be regarded as a state of a material carrier.[19]
The field becomes an irreducible element of
physical description. Everything is in
movement throughout the field at the same time; space is full and dynamic. The universe is full of fields of energy in
various states. Other scientists have
presented the concept of a Brownian motion of countless particles moving in a
gas or liquid, an idea discussed in a musical context by Leonard B. Meyer.[20]
Both the dynamic field and the Brownian
motion are analogous to sound mass pieces by Varèse,
Ligeti, Penderecki, and other composers.
Varèse's
blocks of sound (see
Hyperprism,
Ionisation, Arcana, and other works), attracting
and repelling one another and recombining in various ways, depict fields of
energy in various states, while Ligeti's
mikropolyphonie (see
Atmospheres, Lux Aeterna,
and other pieces) is related to the
Brownian metaphor, though his pitches and rhythms move less randomly than
particles in a gas or liquid. A
composition like Penderecki's
Threnody
to the Victims of Hiroshima would appear to be more
random, given its greater freedoms of register and time; however, the quality
of time heard in performance is only subtly different.
Special conceptions of
space are a critical component of the art of the Cubists and of sculptures and
architectural works created at this time.
Fragmented discontinuities in paintings by Picasso, Braque, and others
are well-known, as are comparisons of Picasso's spatial discontinuities and
Stravinsky's temporal ones. The Cubists
made use of multiple perspective and compound views of the same object, just as
Schoenberg conceived of manipulations of the tone row as differing views of the
same hat and Varèse made
connections between musical structure and that of a crystal. Kern points out that many artists, stage
designers, and sculptors of the early twentieth century were fascinated with
positive negative space, in which negative (empty) space was surrounded by
positive space in such a way that the previously empty area became an essential
part of the work's meaning. Sculptures
such as
Woman
Combing Her Hair by Alexander Archipenko, in which an arching arm
frames the empty space that is the head, make use of positive negative space,
while literary works by Mallarmé,
William Carlos Williams, and others exemplify positive negative space on the
page as well as positive negative time upon being read aloud. Kern is therefore positing three different
categories of space (or time): positive,
negative, and positive negative.
Positive space includes substance and meaning, while negative space does
not. Positive negative space is thus a
special category: strictly speaking,
there is no "substance" present, but the surrounding positive space
gives this negative space meaning; thus, a label like "positive negative"
is more appropriate than simply "negative."[21]
Composers create
positive negative time in music by using silence. A brief summary of three articles about
silence in music is followed by a critical examination of Kern's notion of
positive negative time.
Gisèle
Brelet asserts that a background silence frames music, and in fact "always
exists in music, actually or implicitly."[22]
This silence "protects music from all
the exterior noises of the ordinary world."[23]
While Edward Cone and other writers have
examined the role of the framing silence, the notion of an ever-present
background silence may well be unique to this article.[24]
According to Brelet, this silence has a
formal power, or power of determination, and may be "an obstacle breaking
the forward movement of musical time."[25]
Expressive silences may be integrated into
the form for punctuation purposes.
Thomas Clifton
identifies three kinds of musical silences:
temporal, spatial, and gestural.[26]
Temporal silences cut off a succession of
events, and may be "hard-edged" as in rests in Mahler's
Seventh Symphony
and the accented rest in the development section of the first movement of the
Eroica
(see m. 280), or they may be "smooth," as in the sixth measure of
Debussy's
Prelude
to the Afternoon of a Faun. Spatial silences include three
subcategories: first, silences which
highlight the arrival of another part or changed activity in one part (as in a
line dropping out and reentering in a Bach fugue, or possibly, as Kern implies,
as in
Klangfarbenmelodie); second, large-scale connections (exemplified
by the high A's in the introduction to the first movement of Beethoven's
Seventh Symphony);
and third, silences which create gaps or absences in registral space, going as
far as disengaging silences like those at the end of Berg's
Lyric Suite
or Mahler's
Ninth Symphony. Gestural silences are silences in motion,
where melodic motion carries through the gaps written into the melody - these
are determined only by listening, according to Clifton. His categories are a bit hazy and exhibit
some overlap.
Zofia Lissa traces a
dialectic of sound and silence through a multitude of styles and at various
formal junctures, such as the pause before the onset of the second theme in
sonata form or the silences between movements.[27]
She views Beethoven as using silences for suspense,
while Chopin and Liszt make use of silences "bristling with
expectancy." Lissa interprets
silence in Impressionistic music as a "re-echo," in which the sound
lingers in the memory until the next sound enters. In pointillistic twentieth-century works such
as Webern's
Pieces
for Orchestra, Op. 10, no. 4 and
Piano Variations, Op.
27, Lissa hears rests wrap around the sound figures. With the advent of electronic music and
musique concrète, Lissa
states that silences are used as a constructional element.
The notion of silences
as a significant component in the structure and meaning of the work comes
closest to Kern's conception of silence as positive negative time. In most works through the nineteenth century,
the musical fabric was a continuum of sound, into which silences were
incorporated as points of articulation, surprise, or for other reasons. Twentieth-century works, particularly those
of the second Viennese school, alter the proportions of sound and silence to
the point where there is a kinetic interplay between the sounds and
silences. This interaction is important
in compositions by Debussy and Schoenberg, as in Debussy's
Prelude to the Afternoon of a
Faun or Schoenberg's
Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, Op.
19. The proportion of silence to sound
increases in music by Webern, Varèse,
and Cage, to the extreme where in works such as
Poème
électronique
by Varèse or
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
(1951) by Cage, the fragments of sound appear to be tossed onto a background of
silence, much in the way that Jackson Pollack threw paint onto a canvas. This analogy, however, points toward a
contradiction in Kern's argument. The
contradiction is related to meaning.
The meaning which the
viewer or listener derives from the artwork does not generally come from the
canvas or the background silence, but rather from the paint or the sound
fragments - the positive space or time.
The silences allow reflection and assimilation and influence the
structure of a work, but generally the meaning is derived from the
"positive" time or sound. In a
sculpture like Archipenko's Woman Combing Her Hair, the negative space has
meaning, but it is defined through the surrounding positive space. Similarly, if the silence has meaning, it is
defined by the sound around it, even where there are far fewer sounds than
silences. Kern finds important,
meaningful silences in Webern's music, where isolated notes are surrounded by
much silence, as in the opening of the
Passacaglia, Op. 1.
[28]
Silences are important, but paradoxically,
silence may well have more meaning where it frustrates an expectation (like the
accented rest in the
Eroica)
where it is a more general background and one is not sure what to expect. Thus, negative space acquired more meaning
(as defined by the surrounding positive space) in the early twentieth century,
but negative time (or, silence) lost some of its meaning even while occurring
more frequently, because there was less positive time (or, sound) to give it
definition. Further, Kern states that
the increased meaning of negative space levels the hierarchy of positive and
negative space; what was simply negative space becomes positive negative space
as its constituent function increases in importance. While this may be accurate, the assumption
that the hierarchy of positive and negative time is leveled through increased
meaning of negative time does not hold true if my idea of lost meaning is
correct; positive time (sound) still has a more important role in creating
meaning than does negative time (silence).
George Crumb is well
known for his use of silence and for the quality of ritual time evoked in his
works. His early composition
Eleven Echoes of Autumn, 1965
(Echoes I) was completed in 1966, and although some
consider it merely a study-piece for his Pulitzer Prize-winning
Echoes of Time and the River
(Echoes
II), (1967), it includes interesting qualities of time at a
variety of structural levels. The work
is scored for violin, alto flute, clarinet, and piano, and it consists of
eleven echi[29]
of varying lengths and instrumentation.
At the foreground and middleground levels, time in this work is
relatively discontinuous; however, the background level is unified by what
Crumb calls a "larger expressive curve."
The pitch construction
of
Eleven
Echoes is fairly simple:
it includes what Crumb refers to as the "bell motif," which is
a quintuplet figure consisting of one pitch then a reiterated pitch a whole
step lower. The combination of the first
two statements of the bell motif produces a (0, 2, 5, 7) tetrachord which is
the basic set used throughout the work.
In addition to the (0, 2, 5, 7) set, Crumb uses sets with direct
intervallic relationships to it: the set
(0, 1, 6, 7) is created by compressing the whole steps to half steps; the set
(0, 1, 6), used in a typically Viennese trichord intervallic configuration, is
a subset of (0, 1, 6, 7); finally, the whole-tone set (0, 2, 6, 8) is created
by "expanding" the interior minor third of (0, 2, 5, 7) to a major
third. These sets are used most frequently
in the work; they contribute to time at the largest scale in that Crumb uses
the more "diatonic" sets [(0, 2, 5, 7) and (0, 2, 6, 8)] at the
opening and conclusion of the work, reserving the more "chromatic,
dissonant" sets [(0, 1, 6, 7) and its subset (0, 1, 6)] for the climactic
middle portion of the piece.
The idea of time is a
critical component of the piece's overall shape. Crumb writes that the work is based in part
upon the Federico García
Lorca quote "...y
los arcos rotos donde sufre el tiempo"
("...and the broken arches where time suffers"). Crumb finds numerous ways to make time
"suffer" throughout the work; the most prominent technique is the use
of long pauses within (and sometimes between) the various echi. In addition to the pauses, Crumb creates
echoes (and thus the distortion of time) within a single instrument, between
two instruments, and by using sympathetic vibrations.[30]
The piano creates its own echoes through the
use of dynamics and register in echi one and four, while the alto flute and
clarinet share in creating echoes in several of the echi. As he does in some of his other compositions,
Crumb has the wind players play into the piano with the sustaining pedal
depressed, thus taking advantage of the sympathetic vibrations produced. He uses this effect in echi four, eight, and
nine; it literally creates a quality of "re-echo" in which the sound
lingers. One might go so far as to state
that the pauses and sympathetic vibrations do create some sense of positive
negative time, where the silences contain meaning, if for nothing else than
reflection and savoring the pitches, registers, and timbres used.
Crumb creates a variety
of times at a higher structural level.
The entire work is placed upon a background of silence, as the opening
emerges out of silence while eco eleven gradually recedes into
nothingness. Crumb creates groupings of
echi by arranging that some be followed attaca by the next; they are echi 1,
2-4, 5-8, and 9-11. Echi 5-7 form the
midpoint, and each is an accompanied cadenza (alto flute, violin, and clarinet
respectively). The notation of the solo
lines (many short staves rather than fewer long ones) as well as the
accompaniment (circular notation which proceeds halfway clockwise then reverses
itself counterclockwise) represents "the broken arches where time
suffers." The climax of the work is
eco eight, after which there is a gradual dissolution into silence. The overall arch shape is created through
dynamics, grouping, register, rhythmic intensity, an overall pitch shape of
diatonic-chromatic-diatonic, and even conceivably through lighting. One possibility given by the composer is:
A
deep blue lighting at the beginning; then very gradually (almost imperceptibly)
brightening until reaching a fiery red at the beginning of eco 8; then very
gradually dimming until reaching total darkness at the beginning of eco 11.[31]
The
overall arch shape of the work is concluded by eco eleven, where the bell motif
recurs in its original diatonic configuration.
Even at this point, time is still distorted, as the pauses between
statements of the bell motif continually increase in duration, leaving one
unsure when or if the bell motif will be heard again. The composition merges with the background
silence from which it began. Despite the
distortion and the suspended moments it has suffered, time continues.
A great number of ideas
have been considered; in particular, this article has examined the
relationships between some twentieth-century music and public and private times,
relativistic time, and positive negative space and time. A variety of new musical temporalities
emerged in the twentieth-century; these temporalities are explored in this
article and investigated in a different fashion in Kramer's book
The Time of Music. At its conclusion (see pp. 394-97), Kramer
summarizes J. T. Fraser's hierarchical theory of time, which received its
impetus from von Uexküll's
theories mentioned earlier in this paper.
Kramer then draws analogies between Fraser's theory and his own ideas
about musical times in twentieth-century music, as shown in Table 1.