MTO 13.3: Murphy, Considering Network
Volume 13, Number 3, September 2007 Copyright © 2007 Society for Music Theory Scott Murphy REFERENCE: http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.07.13.2/mto.07.13.2.buchler.html KEYWORDS: Klumpenhouwer network, recursion, self-similarity, Bartók, analysis, inversion, mirror, axis, register ABSTRACT: Notions of network recursion, as they have been designated in music analyses, may be organized into five categories that range from exact self-similarity to self-dissimilarity. This perspective reveals that Michael Buchler’s critique of network recursion does not necessarily fully apply to analyses in all categories of network recursion. An analysis of Bartók’s “Fourths” serves as an example of how network recursion analysis can achieve significant results and avoid most of, if not all of, Buchler’s critique. Received September 2007 [1] In his article “Reconsidering Klumpenhouwer Networks,” Michael Buchler advocates for a stronger perceptual salience of the types of observations that Klumpenhouwer networks afford. In the course of his critique, he presents two criteria that perceptually salient K-net analyses should meet: they should take place in registral space (henceforth, p-space) to an appreciable degree,(1) and they should not endure the perceptual strain of negative isography, i.e. dual- or hyper-inversions (2) (<In >). The price for the former is an increase in analytical exclusivity, since such relationships do not occur as often in the literature. The price for the latter seems steeper, as Buchler explains: “One could avoid the particular phenomenological problem of dual inversion by resolving to employ only positively isographic K-nets, but doing so effectively forfeits one’s ability to produce recursive network structures, and these are perhaps the greatest incentive for using K-nets in the first place.”(3) Part II of this article presents a K-net analysis of Bartók’s “Fourths” from Mikrokosmos that meets both of these criteria.
[Show full text]