Trajectory, Material, Process, and Flow in Robert Morris's String Quartet Arc

Abstract

TRAJECTORY, MATERIAL, PROCESS, AND FLOW IN ROBERT MORRIS’S STRING QUARTET ARC JOSHUA B. MAILMAN ORRIS’S ARC (1988) FOR STRING QUARTET flows; it flows with substance , and with purpose. By flowing, I don’t just mean in the trivial sense that all music flows because it is unfolding in time and time flows. Rather I mean that there is continuity to its various surges of eventfulness; these surges are not disjunct or sudden. And by substance I mean both that its sound is as a sensuous fluid material and that the unfolding of its constituent events presents a coherent organization , thus binding together into a statement that seems meaningful in retrospect. By purpose I mean not only that there is a local logic to the consequence of one note following another, but also that the flow of events enables the material to organize into processes that forge a trajectory toward a goal. M 250 Perspectives of New Music With this characterization in mind, the reader is encouraged to listen to mm. 1–27 of Arc (from 0:00 to 1:45 on the JACK Quartet rendition on the audio CD included with this volume).1 In particular, you might listen three times, attending to how the passage (1) gradually gains rhythmic excitement, how it (2) becomes more and more varied in texture, and (3) how it becomes increasingly cohesive in terms of pitch. Each of these distinct qualities gets increasingly more intense and reaches its height of intensity at the point the quartet converges on a single pitch in mm. 25–26, a pitch with a particular significance for the passage’s serial pitch-class structure. You might or might not hear the passage as I characterize it. If you don’t, the analysis presented will help you get to hear it; and if you already do, the analysis will help you understand why.2 The analysis first focuses on local details considered in terms of pitch and pitch-class formations as arising from twelve-tone rows;3 then it delves into aspects of form, process, and texture. These I consider in terms of emergent properties in flux.4 The modeling of these properties and their flux employs some mathematical formalisms, but the reader can rely on the fact that every mathematical definition and formula is described carefully in prose as well. (The reader can use the verbal descriptions to help decipher the mathematical formulations or entirely skip over each mathematical formulation and still follow the analysis.) Nevertheless I regard the formalisms (and the graphs generated from them) as part of the process of getting from subjective isolation (disagreement) to intersubjective communality (agreement); also these formalisms are helpful for analyzing other compositions. These are reasons why they are included here. In Arc, the twelve-tone pitch class details and the surging emergent qualities projecting form are not completely separate from each other. Rather, all these features interact. Thus not only will my discussion weave together connections between such facets as form, process, and texture, but it will also connect these to the twelve-tone rows and pitchclass configurations that are more straightforwardly part of the compositional plan (and more usual in analyses) of Morris’s music. (Example 1 shows Arc’s twelve-tone row matrix.) THE INTRODUCTION (MM. 1–26) OF MORRIS’S ARC FOR STRING QUARTET The analysis focuses just on Arc’s (1988) introduction (mm. 1–26), as it deftly sets the stage for the work’s subsequent action. I hear the introduction as a trajectory leading to a culminating moment that Trajectory, Material, Process, and Flow in Morris’s String Quartet Arc 251 reveals with unprecedented intensity the relevant features of the material that fuel the work. These passages are thus experienced as if hiking through increasingly tangled woods before arriving at a clearing. Not only the culminating moment itself, but also the process, or processes, of reaching it are particularly striking: a surging trajectory sculpted by the irregular flux of several emergent properties, which I’ll consider in detail. The irregularity of the flux strategically prevents the culmination from seeming a foregone conclusion.5 The incremental nature of the changes in the various properties ensures...