Convergence Lines: A Musical Distillation of Thomas Pynchon’s V.
Christopher Trapani
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2017 © 2017 Christopher M. Trapani All rights reserved ABSTRACT
Convergence Lines: A Musical Distillation of Thomas Pynchon’s V.
Christopher Trapani
This dissertation consists of two parts: Convergence Lines, my twenty-four-minute composition for ten instruments and electronics, and this subsidiary essay. Convergence
Lines was written in 2013 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of
Thomas Pynchon’s V. At the center of this discussion is my creative process in imagining a musical corollary to Pynchon’s fictional world: his large cast of vivid characters, far-flung settings, and disjointed sense of time. I also detail my attempt to fashion a formal parallel to the novel’s unorthodox structure of two independent strands of narrative that converge towards the end. I discuss the role of allusion in
Pynchon’s work and in my own, and the various points of reference the music is meant to invoke. A second important topic is the role of electronics in the composition, presenting both a technical analysis of the tools employed and an aesthetic perspective, considering how the intrusion of non-acoustic sounds mirrors a central theme of V.: the gradual replacement of the animate by the inanimate. The thesis endeavors to explain from a composer’s perspective, and in an integrated, organic manner, the poetic, musical, and technical aspects behind my work. TABLE OF CONTENTS
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LIST OF CHARTS, GRAPHS, AND ILLUSTRATIONS iii LIST OF MEDIA EXAMPLES iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: 50 years of V. 6 CHAPTER 2: Structure, Setting, Plot 7 CHAPTER 3: Music and Postmodernism 9 Allusion/Intertextuality 11 Fragmentation/Discontinuity 13 Eclecticism 15 Irony 16 CHAPTER 4: Major Themes of V. and their Musical Corollaries 17 I. Travel and The Exotic: Baedeker’s World 17 II. Colonialism and Decadence 18 III. Entropy and the Inanimate 19 CHAPTER 5: Overview of Electronic Tools 20 OpenMusic and Spatialized Sound Files 21 CataRT and Targeted Transposition 22 Antescofo: Machine Listening and Score Following 24 CHAPTER 6: Work Plan 25 CHAPTER 7: Ensemble and Setup 29