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Space Experience in Works for Solo Cello by Lachenmann, Xenakis and Ferneyhough: a Performance-Sensitive Approach to Morphosyntactic Musical Analysis

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Space Experience in Works for Solo Cello by Lachenmann, Xenakis and Ferneyhough: a Performance-Sensitive Approach to Morphosyntactic Musical Analysis DOI: 10.1111/musa.12076 CHRISTIAN UTZ TIME-SPACE EXPERIENCE IN WORKS FOR SOLO CELLO BY LACHENMANN, XENAKIS AND FERNEYHOUGH: A PERFORMANCE-SENSITIVE APPROACH TO MORPHOSYNTACTIC MUSICAL ANALYSIS Recent studies in music performance reflect an increasing degree of specialisation: quantifiable methods of performance science, research into the impact of historical performance styles on contemporary practice, performance- oriented analysis and performers’ own perspectives on the music they perform often share common objectives but approach them through radically different channels and methods. In particular, two methodological oppositions frequently coexist unsympathetically rather than communicating with each other: (1) the historical and analytical interest in how musical structure is qualified in particular performances or performance styles often seems incompatible with the quantifiability of tempo, duration and dynamics in recorded music as widely explored in current performance studies; (2) such a rationalisation of performance parameters is often considered to be antagonistic to the inescapable and idiosyncratic forms of ‘intuitive knowledge’ or ‘informed intuition’ (Rink 2002, p. 36) applied by performers in rehearsal and performance. In this essay I plan to tackle the first opposition by means of continuous references to the second. In facing the first opposition, I wish to find ways in which a historically and analytically informed qualification of performed sound structures and quantified data derived from recordings can be brought into a meaningful cross-relation. My case studies here are three significant solo cello works dating from the 1960s and ’70s: Iannis Xenakis’s Nomos Alpha (1966), Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression (1969–70) and Brian Ferneyhough’s TimeandMotionStudyII(1973–6). All three have become classics of the solo cello repertoire despite the exceptional difficulties they pose, and they have been performed and recorded frequently. My focus lies on the compositional construction, performative communication and perceptual experience of temporality. More precisely, I intend to explore how particular forms of time experience, as suggested by these works’ musical structure and the composers’ poetics, are transformed into experienced sound-time in performance and perception. [The copyright line for this article was changed on 12th October 2016 after original online publication.] 216 Music Analysis, 36/ii (2017) © 2016 The Authors. Music Analysis published by Society for Music Analysis and John Wiley & Sons Ltd This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. APERFORMANCE-SENSITIVE APPROACH TO MORPHOSYNTACTIC ANALYSIS 217 In order to relate performed sound structures to quantified data, I shall discuss the three works in a twofold process: each is introduced briefly according to a method that I have termed ‘morphosyntactic analysis’,1 which aims to capture the multivalence or layeredness of musical sound particularly by cross-relating spatial or morphological aspects of perception (gestalt formation and spatialisation of events in memory) and temporal or syntactic aspects (transformation or change of musical events or processes in time and their syntactic relationships). It is in part derived from Nicholas Cook’s idea that musical structure is not simply encoded in the score but rather constituted in the acts of performance and perception (Cook 1999 and 2013), and it is grounded on research into the perception of musical sound in Albert Bregman’s model of spatialised auditory ‘scenes’ based on musical streams, contours and segments (1990) and Irene` Deliege’s` theory of cues, imprints, and prototypes (Deliege` and Melen´ 1997). Similar to what Cook defined as ‘performative analysis’ (1999, pp. 242–4) and understanding performance and analysis as ‘interlocking modes of musical knowledge’ (1999, p. 248), this approach describes different strata of aural experience and relates them to one another, demonstrating possible synergies as well as conflicts between them. The main techniques of analysis in addition to established methods of sketch- and score-based structural analysis are close listening, the strategic use of amplitude graphs and spectral analyses, and the inclusion of performances and recordings in the analytical process. The latter strategy will be utilised in depth in this essay, exploring how specific models of temporality isolated in the analyses are actually rendered in performance; thus, the present essay is also conceived of as an exemplification and expansion of the morphosyntactic analytical model. This involves the interpretation of quantified data from studio and live recordings as well as a consideration of composers’ and performers’ statements about their intentions and experiences. In order to demonstrate the versatility and context sensitivity of the analytical method and to point to broader tendencies within the discussed repertoire against the background of its historical context, Lachenmann’s Pression will be analysed in greater detail, particularly in terms of its large-scale form, while only one representative section each from Xenakis’s and Ferneyhough’s works will be addressed. Musical Temporality: Methodological Considerations The reason for choosing temporality as the main field of inquiry is that the experience of musical time is often conceived to lie at the ‘heart of performance’ (Rink 2002, p. 39) while appearing to be sidelined by structuralist analysis. In fact, ‘the time of music’ has been a broad field of investigation for a quarter of a century (see Alperson 1980; Kramer 1988; Barry 1990; Houben 1992; Klein, Kiem and Ette 2000; Berger 2007 and Crispin and Snyers 2009), even if few of these studies have an explicit analytical focus. In recent essays I have Music Analysis, 36/ii (2017) © 2016 The Authors. Music Analysis published by Society for Music Analysis and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 218 CHRISTIAN UTZ discussed aspects of the analysability of temporality in twentieth-century art music (Utz 2014 and 2015), aiming at a morphosyntactic analysis and historical contextualisation of fragmented and/or spatialised concepts of musical time as frequently conceived in postwar art music by such composers as Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Giacinto Scelsi and Gyorgy¨ Kurtag.´ A common objective found in most of these approaches is the drive towards an implicit destabilisation or even an open rejection of ‘objective’ musical time as represented by architectural formal metaphors or simplified ‘clock’ models. Cook’s recent explorations into the temporality of musical performance suggest that the use of such metaphors, inherent in most established theories of musical form, has its complement in the history of performance styles, for it interlocks closely with literalist performance traditions embodied by Stravinsky’s aesthetics of ‘execution’ (1947, p. 122) and most prominently promoted and disseminated by Nadia Boulanger (see Cook 2013, pp. 219–23). Cook’s study emphasises repeatedly, however, that (pre- modernist) ‘rhetorical’ and (modernist) ‘structuralist’ or ‘literalist’ performance styles do not conform neatly to a coherent history of performance – a point also raised by other scholars of musical performance (Hinrichsen 2011, pp. 36–7). Indeed, an enduring opposition to ‘literalist misunderstandings’ in the verbal interpretation and performance practice of postwar art music helps to explain the extent to which non-linear, phenomenological or presentist time concepts were embraced by the musical avant-garde (Utz 2014 and 2015). Thus, it is not as obvious as it may seem that recent avant-garde music relies merely on literalist performance traditions. Conversely, the following analyses will provide ample evidence for Cook’s claim that ‘rhetorical and structuralist approaches represent complementary possibilities for construing music as thought and action’ (2013, p. 129) rather than irreconcilable opposites which establish a linear historical causality. By the same token, however, it is clear that Cook’s distinction between a performance-oriented phenomenological approach that conceives music as time, as opposed to the structuralist idea of presenting a musical object in time (pp. 124–34), appears artificial when read against composition and performance practice. For one thing, the question of how a performer may suggest, support, subvert or combine different forms of temporal experience cannot be answered straightforwardly: composers’ and performers’ shaping of time and listeners’ experience of it do not necessarily correlate with one another, nor can they be reduced to simple aesthetic categories or quantitative data. Moreover, it may be maintained that the quantitative aspect of time (music in time) is, in the end, inextricably bound to the qualitative aspects of time experience (music as time), even if not in the sense of a simple correlation or reciprocity. It would be nearly impossible, for instance, to experience a sharp, regular beat as a manifestation of timelessness or to perform contemplative listening in a ‘chaotic’ montage setting such as those created by John Zorn’s group Naked City. Apart from such obvious examples, of course, it is necessary to insist on an unrestricted freedom of association and imagination with regard to the experiences of © 2016 The Authors. Music Analysis, 36/ii (2017) Music Analysis published by Society for Music Analysis and John
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