Meta-Variations and the Art of Engaging Music

Abstract

Meta-Variations and the Art of Engaging Music Marianne Kielian-Gilbert i. There is a saying in the Tibetan scriptures: "Knowledge must be burned, hammered and beaten like pure gold. Then one can wear it as an ornament." How are we to claim our experience of music so that we assimilate thatwhich we experience? How arewe to enter into the unfolding workings of musical structure and engage in finer and finer discrimina tions of experientially construed "phenomenal particulars"?1 For myself, entertaining these kinds of questions is remembering Meta-Variations, resonating then and now. In thinking about the ways the work of Benjamin Boretz influences my own, I have encountered views (contrary tomine) of his modeling ofmusical discernment: Meta-Vanations and the Art of Engaging Music I I [A]nalyzing music, forBoretz as for other formalists,meant devising a series of formal rules showing how the structure of the individual piece (or at least the best possible approximation of it) could be reconstructed from the elementary discriminations of pitch and time common to all music. . . . Where the Schenkerian analyst is interested in the psychological experience of time, the formal analyst conceives structure statically, in terms of logical patterns. . . . Whereas Schenkerian analysis uses the experience ofmusic as its rawmaterial, formal analysis quite liter ally analyzes the score.2 This thinking somehow misses an important facet of the author ofMeta Variations. If Meta-Variations can teach us anything, it is that experienc ingmusic is an ongoing process of involvement and creation. Its perspec tives are thus, in this sense, not psychological, or psychologically limiting: we direct, invent, and are responsible for our own musical perceptions.3 Rather than seeking characteristic behaviors, or adopting the third-person external perspective of a scientificpsychologist, in Meta-Variations Boretz writes about the art of engaging music. For myself, its attitudes toward the interacting relationships of observer and observed have been a primary influence. These attitudes, moreover, provide an appropriate framework for regarding themore technical aspects of Boretz's work.4 One goal of this essay is thus to consider the continued relevance of the processes of musical thought (cognitively-temporal and 'ascriptively') characterized in Meta-VariationsTor modes ofmusical activity. I discuss several broad themes of his work that have most directly shaped my own: his suspension of judgment (evaluation) and his regard for the 'temporalities' of unique musical characterization; his sensitivity to the relationship between musical experiences, referential frameworks, and the words that characterize them; his engagement with the musi cally present as the particular feel of events and the particular sense-in which they transform the past and suggest the future, and finally; his fos tering of analysis as an open and creative process.5 Interesting in retro spect, these themes resonate in eastern philosophical thought as suggested by the epigraphs that precede, and the brief discussion that concludes, each section.6 Evocative of the opening epigraph?knowledge involves living prac tice, process, and experience?"burned, hammered and beaten like pure gold"?before itcan be worn. Its paths do not go theway of imitation, or offer consolation or confirmation. Not to be taken uncritically, know ledge entwines personal and social experience.7 12 PerspectivesofNew Music 2. Suspending Judgment?Analysis as Characterizing Uniquely Q: How isone to begin to seewhat is? A: By not beginning,bygivingup the ideaof a beginning.... You have togive up the ideaof territory altogether. Which can be done, itisnot impossible. For Boretz, "[t]he purpose of an analysis (or a composition) is to recon struct (or construct) amusical structure,"8 musical structure being "the coherent juxtaposition of everything relevant to the identity of amusical work."9 Relevance is determined by thatwhich "makes the most music possible . . . , by discerning the most instances and kinds of coherence that can be [ascribed] . . . with the least inferential complexity."10 Similar to the sense inwhich a particular performance or a "silent" rehearing might focus the sound relationships of a work, a composition may suggest criteria for attributing significance to the individual events within its sound world(s) or the changing conditions thatmight qualify that construal. Similarly, chronological, cultural, and ideological perspec tives may circumscribe these events and the 'worlds' of individual works and literatures. The significance, shape...