Meta-music
I’ve recently finished working on a project that I started in late 2007. This project is for a string quartet, and it contains some dualities in its structure.
The idea was to construct a sort of musical meta-narrative, in the sense that it is somewhat self-referential. The form is about forms. The piece is a continuous set of six movements, and each movement is split at the middle and flows into the beginning of the next piece before finishing.
Think of it like this:
A1, B1, C1, D1, A2, B2, C2, D2 etc…
Each half of these self-contained pieces appear at different points during the course of the work, which is where the duality presents itself.
Since these pieces are split, their “narrative” or flow of events are broken, but when these halves are placed along side each other (A1 going into B1 etc), they still flow continuously. On top of this, since I love symmetry, I have made each one of these self-contained pieces a palindrome (whose mirror half only appears later in the piece).
So the piece is more accurately represented like this:
A1, B1, C1, D1, E (A2), F (B2), G(C2), H(D2)…
It bends my mind just a little bit, and is probably the most difficult challenge I have given myself to date.
This piece is decidedly both linear and not… so it raises the question: which way is up? What is the meaning of musical narrative, and how does it relate to the content vs form?
In all, I’m really glad I finished this piece. It’s been in the back of my mind for nearly three years now, and to finally expunge these sounds is both a relief and bittersweet. The next step is finding an ensemble who is willing to take on a 24 minute essay on symmetry and narrative. Any takers?
