In Time

The Beginning before the Beginning

The “beginning before the beginning” to quote Hans Keller, is the genesis of an idea: not just a general kind of idea but more like ‘Gestalt’, the fundamental idea in Schoenberg’s creative thinking, and, in Keller’s view, of compositional praxis more widely. Keller considered the ‘Gestalt’ concept as the work’s genetic cell, the core motif from which musical actions, characterized by tempo, mode, tessitura and rhythmic profile, subsequently evolved as ‘transformational variations’ (as distinct from ‘developing variations’). As he said in characteristically synoptic fashion: “where there is no theme or motive, there is no variation.” ¹

In Keller’s advanced analytic seminars on the late Beethoven quartets at Dartington International Summer School of Music, he developed his concept of ‘Gestalt’ as the DNA from which the whole work evolved through processes of transformation. Discussing the A minor quartet, Op. 132, he considered the ‘beginning before the beginning’ of the cello’s opening appoggiaturas G#-A, F-E, as ‘Gestalt’, the paradoxical dialectic of prime motif appearing through the character of quasi-introduction. Keller’s extraordinary insight into ‘Gestalt’ like the main actor, whose roles defined networks of coherence across structural frameworks, together with his questioning approach – essentially problem-solving issues of compositional action – provided critical ‘thinking tools’ in writing In Time.

It didn’t start out that way. In fact, it didn’t start out by investigating musical structures as time coding at all. In the ‘beginning before the beginning’, it was planned as a development of contemporary theoretical modeling to explain dimensions of music structures in my previous book, The Musical Matrix Reloaded: Contemporary Perspectives and Alternative Worlds in the Music of Beethoven and Schubert.² These models included genetic theory and the structure of DNA, Black Swans and the Many Worlds theory of alternative outcomes in parallel worlds. Conceived as an extension of theoretical modeling, the book’s initial title was The Musical Matrix Revolutions (recognized by aficionados of The Matrix movies) when life intervened.

Re-reading Jacob Bronowski’s marvelous book The Ascent of Man³ spear-headed one aspect of that intervention: recalibrating the stance of inquiry from models as analogues to models for problem-solving. In Bronowski’s view, problem-solving is the fundamental incentive for creativity and innovation, through questions like: ‘Why does this process work in this particular way? What are the mechanisms (as in DNA) that help explain what happens? And why does it happen?’ Isaiah Berlin considers that meaning as ‘what’ and problem-solving as ‘how’ are the essential questions of philosophy. Theories and models provide the means to frame those inquiries.⁴

Theories are constructive scenarios to help explain such mechanisms, described In Time as strategies and tactics. Strategies are fundamental map-making plans, realized on large-scale operational levels as probabilities of style, and on local levels as events in the route-map of the specific work. Map-making strategies are accordingly constructs of action, defined by co-ordinates of identity, recognition and recall that both shape and unfold in time. Tactics, on the other hand, are short-term solutions specific to the individual work. They can be seen as compositional choice in a specific environment, which, at times, fulfills expectations of action, and at others contradicts implicative probabilities, by digression into unforeseen tonal zones, juxtaposition, or interpolated ‘lacunae’ as reflection. Map-making accordingly shifts the ground plan from conceptual ‘Gestalt’ to time-indexed map-making, with referential motivic co-ordinates of identity that (mostly) refer forwards in time and ‘Leitmotifs’ that may either extend over different time-levels into the future or dip back into the past as memory.

Time in the contemporary world is a multiplicity of buzzing, simultaneous time-strands, where reality jostles with and is inflected by alternative worlds of sci-fi, movies and computer gaming. How are these worlds measured and experienced? Side-by-side with objective, Newtonian clock-time by which to make appointments are diverse kinds of time terrain that stem from the theory of relativity: atomic clocks to calibrate the history of the universe; retroactive time in forays to the past as a kind of time machine; and the human clocks of heart and mind where perception of action ‘in time’ may be either suspended by reflection ‘out of time’ or eclipsed by memory. Musical time’s paradoxical dialectic of logical action and incommensurate enigma, ‘in time’/‘out of time’, was the subject of my PhD and first book Musical Time: The Sense of Order.⁵ From the perspective of problem-solving, In Time revisits those issues in contemporary ‘transformational variations’, integrating strategy as intellectual map-making with music’s experiential journeys in alternative realities.

The layout of chapters reflects this balancing act: map-making strategies for the first three chapters and expressive journeys for the last three. At the center of the book is a discussion about problem-solving and core repertory under threat in contemporary academia. Its point of departure is a question Bronowski asks: what happens to the advance of knowledge when decision-making criteria are distorted by external pressures of money and media? In the context of those questions, conformist cultural preoccupations may have the most vociferous agenda but not necessarily the most interesting art-works. Innovation, as Isaiah Berlin contends, often occurs against the current.⁶ In Peter Gay’s crisp comment, chasing after such preoccupations is “to race, desperately, after a cultural train that left the station long ago.” ⁷

Map-making and expressive journeys are not mutually exclusive. The two Schubert chapters in the first section about modeling and compositional strategy both draw on the free, imaginative perspective ‘quasi una fantasia’, while in the last section, Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’, one of his most expressive compositional journeys, construes poetic iconology as underpinned by a surprising structural program.

There is one last and possibly most intriguing intervention for writing innovative music theory, an encounter, or rather re-encounter, with Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (hereafter GEB).⁸GEB is about thinking and problem-solving in mathematics, art and music. Hofstadter presents another kind of two-sidedness from ‘in’ and ‘out’ of time: one side is serious discussion of typographical number theory, AI, ‘strange loops’, logical and non-commensurate perspectives in Escher’s graphic art, and variations and crab canons in Bach. The other side is whimsical dialogues, on all the above topics, between Achilles and the Tortoise.

But there is a parallel between GEB and ‘in time’/‘out of time’. GEB looks inwards at structure: at complex hierarchical brain networks modeled by AI – that is, problem-solving the brain as structure in order to arrive at the mind as meaning. It also looks outwards, identifying a specific issue, on parallel tracks of mathematics, art and music, and proposes creative solutions.

GEB, then, provides the entry portal to In Time as problem-solving, not just by modeling but by map-making. Cognitive map-making, developed through engaged listening and training, enables us to locate ourselves in a work’s context and navigate its course of action. More widely, musical map-making is a kind of ‘probability signaling’ in a network context that relates to other kinds of learned navigational and routing skills, like stopping at red lights and taking detours in heavy traffic. As techniques of problem-solving – plans in the structure of behavior, to paraphrase psychologist George Miller⁹ – map-making strategies are embedded in the contours of musical journeys as alternative, expressive realties.

A note of appreciation to my music colleagues Lewis Lockwood, Nicholas Kitchen, Christopher Reynolds, Jeremy Yudkin, John Daverio, Constantin Floros, Bennett Zon, David Lewin, Charles Rosen, Hans Keller, Howard Mayer Brown, Scott Burnham, William Kinderman and Julian Johnson. Your friendship is much valued. Thank you.