On the Swerve and the Flow in Thomas Adès's Polaris, op. 29

Abstract

ON THE SWERVE AND THE FLOW IN THOMAS ADÈS’S POLARIS, OP. 29 ORIT HILEWICZ NE OF MY FAVORITE MOMENTS in John Rahn’s writings is the surreal yet vivid scene he presents in “The Swerve and the Flow,” after Lucretius, of “the universe as a frame of atoms of Being falling (naturally, according to their weight) forever in parallel lines, with this important tweak: occasionally, for no reason, an atom will swerve in its fall. . . . The frame of structure (or divine) order and the Swerve of free and artistic will.”1 Reading these words, I could not resist visualizing a scene of heavy, steady rain falling in a vacuum, comprising drops of varying sizes, each falling at a different pace but always directly downwards in multitudes of vertical columns. However, every now and then a drop deviates from its course of its own volition, unexpectedly, as if blown by a sudden wind.2 With this representation of the universe Rahn starts his discussion of musical Being and Becoming, and how music-theoretical accounts can reflect not only fixed and measurable aspects of music as an experience, but also its fluctuating, changing quality. Too often, Rahn contends, analytical methods take as their object a sort of frozen version of the piece, as if it has been transferred from time to space, where it is available all at once to be examined. Indeed, music’s in-the-moment O 224 Perspectives of New Music aspect, which Rahn describes as artistic or human will, is frequently represented in analysis only through the traces it leaves behind, after the change has already taken place. Being is inseparable from Becoming—a chaotic system does not Become, because free will and intention cannot be detected in complete chaos. Musical works establish their state of Being both contextually (within a work) and intertextually, through relationships created with other works. If each musical work is its own universe of falling atoms, then groups of works (e.g. tonal music, or Beethoven’s late string quartets, or serial film music) can share constellations—theorists have been dedicating their life’s work to draw these constellations and explore them. Rahn, however, is posing a problem. While the tools of our discipline (and Rahn is referring specifically to mathematical tools used by theorists) already accommodate accurate descriptions of Being, can mathematical tools be applied also to describe the artistic will that is the impetus of change? Thinking of this predicament when I first read Rahn’s essay, I set aside the fact that he was calling on us to reconsider the potential of mathematical theories for describing the fluctuating aspects of musical experience. Instead, I was interested in the more general problem of isolating that “free and artistic will,” in music-theoretical understanding, from its material consequences in a musical work. Becoming, or the Swerve, is a highly slippery concept to grasp, yet I was impressed by the force of Rahn’s descriptive language, which came close to conveying Becoming. It felt as if the language reveals a trace of the concept in lieu of an explanation. Rahn’s writing in this essay seems to me a powerful tool to express the experience of the Swerve. For example, Rahn never clearly states what a Swerve means for musicians. Neither does he expand on what in music (or in a particular musical work) can be considered Becoming or Being beyond characterizing Being as lack of change (“flash-frozen slices of the universe . . which lie quiet so that their structure may be perceived and described”3) and Becoming as change itself (“change, flux, fire, plasma, flow”4). Still, reading descriptions such as “music flows, and swirls madly,” and considering Rahn’s references not only to Hegel and Nietzsche but also to Langer, Bergson, and Deleuze and Guattari,5 it seemed clear that Becoming for Rahn encompasses something much broader than, say, Schmalfeldt’s deployment of the Hegelian dialectic in the analysis of certain aspects of nineteenth-century musical form, which defines musical Becoming as “the special case whereby the formal function initially suggested by a musical idea, phrase, or section invites retrospective reinterpretation within the larger formal context.”6 But restricting...