(In His Own Words): The Poetry of John Rahn's <em>Sea of Souls</em>

Abstract

WHEN COMPOSERS DRAW: PERSONALIZED MUSIC, FORMALIZED THOUGHT ELIZABETH HOFFMAN AN ESSAY IN TRIBUTE TO JOHN RAHN E OFTEN SAY: THE MUSIC (OR THE SOUND) did something or other. Not merely to or for us but by and for itself. Musical behavior as metaphoric action—movement that seems self-driven—is a familiar construct. Still, such sonic actions are hard to define, whether heard in sound or read into graphic depictions. Are perceived musical behaviors rationalizations? Are they emotional congruences? Are they anthropomorphizations of sonic materiality? Or are they symbolic, even allegorical? We should probably avoid the word “or” here; these rhetorical questions point to a complex ideogram encompassing many conceptual angles. Our impressions of musical agency often leap forcefully in front of our simultaneous awareness of the composer’s historical actions, or our observation of performers’ physical actions. A sensation of sound-in-action is something different. Stravinsky, for one, was attuned to this and requested attention to his abstract musical W 150 Perspectives of New Music constructs in themselves: “my music is to be ‘read,’ to be ‘executed,’ but not to be ‘interpreted’” (Craft 1959, 135). Therefore, when composers themselves reveal anything about their unconscious shaping of their own music’s behavior, this is worth unpacking. How a composer imagines, intuitively, an embodied connection with their “musical self” gets at the very core of the creative process. This essay will look first at attempted approaches to defining musical action in general, and then will explore in detail two composers’ experiential self-definitions, represented in idiosyncratic drawings. Modeling musical behavior, for all the reasons above, is no easier than defining it. Written scores are extreme abstractions. When we say that a sound that “moves” or “moves toward” another, or that a note “catalyzes” or “announces” another, we describe something captured only crudely by standard Western notation. For sure, in print and in performance, we use many directives including phrasing and tempo to intensify or clarify music-as-action. But musical scores mostly fall short in connecting the dots. They are incapable of capturing the blurring of successive sounds that would be required for modeling a possible sensation of relational bodies interleaving, a gestural arc in which one musical body (whether a note or a sound, a point or a swath) reaches forward and the other reaches back through time and across space. A sense of movement in 3D space collapses on the page. Especially without being able to manifest acoustic phenomena, models are left to conjure things akin to maps. Each step in a map could be an endpoint deriving from rules, or, in theory, it could emerge with far more baggage: i.e., the entire previous sequence of branching agential decisions. The latter would be more compelling, if voluminous, and would be speculative unless created by the composer. Only the composer, after all, can truly attempt self-reflection. This tautology goes to the heart of this essay. In the discussion below, the connective paths that can model musicas -action will be thought of as inclusively as possible. The music’s motivations may be obvious or hidden. An action may impact itself or another sonic entity. Paths will be postulated simply as conceptual routes along which any actions—or transformations—take place; this essay thus admits the validity of a Lewin-like account of musical action asserting transformation of one thing into another. The crux of the matter, still, is that neither “some really new thing” from “two similar [ones],” nor “the magic metamorphosis from one thing” “by acts, to a new . . . thing which is quite different” seems to get at the nuanced mechanisms or materiality that might explain a real stretch of music and contextualize it “firmly within musical action” (Rahn 2007, 58–59). When Composers Draw: Personalized Music, Formalized Thought 151 As John Rahn describes, complex math is one avenue of ongoing exploration (ibid., 59–70). Graphic imagery offers additional insights. Drawings, when created by composers, have the potential to reveal their musics-as-action specifically as the composers imagine them— their size, their speed, their gait, their directionality, their energy, all as qualitative representations. This essay focuses on non-representational musical drawings by two composers—Stravinsky and...