12. Syncrisis

Tagg: Music’s Meanings 417 S 12. Syncrisis YNCRISIS [sINkrIsIs] is the second overriding set of parameters shaping a piece of music’s component parts into a whole with a particular form that can carry meaning. If diataxis (see Chapter 11) is the diachronic, episodic, extensional, long-term narrative aspect of musical form, SYNCRISIS is its synchronic, intensional counterpart. In other words, SYNCRISIS denotes form and signification bearing on ‘now sound’, on the arrangement of structural elements inside the extended NM12-Syncrisis.fm. 2017-03-03, 13:31 2017-03-03, NM12-Syncrisis.fm. present. It’s in that sense similar to the notion of a MUSEME STACK (pp. 235-237). Like ‘composition’ in the visual arts, syncrisis involves the simultaneous combination of elements and can also be considered in terms of the shape, form, size and texture of a scene or situation. This chapter is long because it has to confront aspects of form and its meaning that are rarely examined in conventional music studies. To simplify matters, syncrisis can, I think, be understood in two main interrelated ways. One basic approach is, as just intimated, to consider syncrisis ―the composite ‘now sound’― metaphorically in terms of a scene. The other important perspective is distinctly social in the sense that ‘scenes’ represented in music consist of simultaneous strands of sound (voices, instruments, tracks, etc.) that are organised in different ways for different purposes to produce different effects in patterns that make sense to members of the society in and for which the music is produced. These patterns of musical organisation, I argue, vary signifi- cantly in time and place because they connect with patterns of social interaction specific to the culture in which they are produced. Since this aspect of syncrisis involves iconic representation of social interaction, those musical patterns will be called SOCIAL ANAPHONES. These connec- tions between musical and social organisation may seem pretty obvi- ous but they are sometimes, I regret, difficult to explain and even harder to prove. 418 Tagg: Music’s Meanings — 12. Syncrisis Overview The rest of this chapter starts with an introduction to ‘scenes’ as meta- phors of musical syncrisis. To make semiotic sense of such ‘scenes’ the binary notion of FIGURE/GROUND = MELODY/ACCOMPANIMENT is intro- duced (p. 425, ff.). This dualism, at the basis of much European music over the last 250 years, includes a comparison with contrapuntal polyphony of the Renaissance (p. 429 ff.), a discussion of heavy metal sub- jectivity (p. 433) and of the change into the post-rock syncrisis of electronic dance styles (p. 442). After a section explaining the key con- cepts STRAND, PARTICIPANT and LAYER (p. 446), the structural and social aspects of solo, unison, heterophony, homophony and counterpoint are presented (p. 449). Particular attention is paid to the cross-rhythmic syncrisis of Sub-Saharan musics (p. 457) and to its influence on the most widely diffused types of popular music in the second half of the twen- tieth century (p. 463). The final part of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of other ways in which musical ‘figure[s]/individual[s]’ and ‘ground/environment’ are put into music (p. 467), including a section on responsoriality (p. 470), a brief return to the notion of ‘scene’ (p. 479) and a 10-point summary of the chapter’s main ideas (p. 483). Musogenic scenes Ten examples 1. A cowboy rides across the prairie towards a frontier town in 1881. 2. Mongol marauders descend on a Hungarian village in 1241. 3. A young woman in a long dress strolls through the long grass of a sunlit summer meadow. 4. The reptile invaders’ gigantic flying saucer casts its threatening shadow over the whole city. 5. Slow pan: Antarctic snow and ice stretch as far as the eye can see. 6. A relentless sun scorches the endless sand of the Arabian desert. 7. The dark waters of a misty, moonlit lake lie still, deep in a Northern European forest, some time in the ‘dark ages’. 8. A dewy summer dawn breaks slowly over the countryside. 9. A prisoner is led solemnly and relentlessly to the guillotine. 10. A 1970s female fashion model in a silk nightgown swans around her penthouse apartment on New York’s upper West Side. Tagg: Music’s Meanings — 12. Syncrisis 419 These are just a few among countless possible musogenic scenes. All ten are either mentioned elsewhere in this book or have been set to music in well-known audiovisual productions or programmatic composi- tions.1 Some of the scenes contain one individual, others two, several, many or none. Some are wide and open, others confined and enclosed. Some contain a variety or unity of quick movement, while others are slower, or even static. Some movement is towards a goal, while other scenes contain veritable hives of non-directional activity. Some are gen- tle, others violent; some hot, others cold; some dark, others light; some pleasant and relaxing, others unpleasant and disturbing. Music appropriate to the ten scenes will vary as much as the scenes themselves. The musical differences will be determined by how the parameters of expression explained in Chapters 8-10 are used and combined into a synchronic whole or SYNCRISIS.2 These synchronic aggregates of meaningful musical structure consist of musemes relat- ing not only to different sorts of people (cowboy, prisoner, demons, parent and child, etc.), nor just to geo-ethnic, historical or social loca- tion (prairie, Arabia, 1970s, penthouse, etc.), nor just to particular types of movement or action (riding, marauding, flowing, strolling, glisten- ing, swirling, stillness, etc.), nor even just to types of space, nor simply to degrees of pleasantness and unpleasantness, but to the way in which all such elements are combined into a whole. Syncrisis can often include the representation of social relations ―SOCIAL ANAPHONES― by conﬁgur- ing unison, polyphony, responsoriality, polyrhythm, etc. in specific ways. Syncrisis also involves texture with its interrelated bipolar scales of musical density/sparsity and singularity/multiplicity. 1. [1] The Virginian (Faith, 1962), see pp. 48-49, 290, 487. [2] See page 487. [3] The Dream of Olwen (Williams, 1947), pp. 167-169, 508-509. [4] V - The Final Battle (1983). [5] Sin- fonia Antarctica (Vaughan Williams, 1947). [6] ‘The Sun’s Anvil’ in Lawrence of Arabia (Jarre, 1963). [7] ‘Mystery Lake’, pp. 239-241. [8] ‘Lever du jour’ from Daphnis et Chloë Suite 2 (Ravel, 1913). [9] ‘Marche au supplice’ in Symphonie fantastique (Berlioz, 1830). [10] See page 458. Try also [11] the Kojak theme (Goldenberg, 1973) for heroics in a busy, sunlit New York and [12] Night on a Bare Mountain (Mussorgsky, 1863) for the nocturnal swarming of evil spirits. 2. See MUSEME STACKs and the EXTENDED PRESENT (pp. 235-238, 272-273, 511 ff, 526, 596). 420 Tagg: Music’s Meanings — 12. Syncrisis Density and sparsity Fig. 12-1. (a) Respighi: ‘Trevi fountain at noon’ from Fontane di Roma (1916); (b) Borodin: Opening of On the Steppes of Central Asia (1880). (a) (b) Notational skills aren’t needed to grasp the fact that the Respighi soundbyte is densely packed ―lots of people milling round a gushing fountain in central Rome in the middle of the day― and that the ﬁrst few bars of the Borodin piece are very sparse ―vast expanses of sky and of featureless flat land without motion as far as the eye can see. Fig- ure 12-1 illustrates how musical texture can be (a) dense or (b) sparse, Tagg: Music’s Meanings — 12. Syncrisis 421 both diachronically and synchronically. Diachronic density is ‘horizon- tal’ and involves notes coming fast and furious with little or no let-up (as in fig. 12-1a), while synchronic density is more ‘vertical’ and involves notes close in pitch sounding at the same time. Synchronic density can be close —notes bunched together in one register, as in ‘close har- mony’— or capacious —lots of notes in all registers at the same time, as in the Respighi sample. Sparse musical texture is emptier, less ‘busy’, less compact, etc. (fig. 12-1b). Sparse synchronic texture, if it covers a wide pitch range, will contain ample registral distance between instruments, voices or parts. Diachronic sparsity will more likely involve a slower surface rate, as in the Borodin quote and in the examples of WIDE-OPEN SPACES music discussed next, a popular musogenic scene trope (see figure 12-2, p. 422) whose ‘floating’ stillness rarely includes much movement in lower registers (fig. 12-1b). Loudness can also be important in determining how dense or sparse the music sounds. Con- stantly loud music containing few or no micro-durations of rest, as in the Respighi quote (it’s horizontally and vertically packed to capacity), or like the compression effects described on pages 312-314, creates a dense texture that literally occupies more (spatial) volume, or builds a wall of sound. Sparse texture is more likely to derive from distinct differences in loudness and timbre or, as just implied, from the presence of more ‘windows of silence’, more sonic open space, both vertically and horizontally. Figure 12-2 (p. 422) shows the sort of wide open spaces and stillness mentioned in titles to works by Borodin ― On the Steppes of Central Asia (1880)― and Copland ―’On the Open Prairie’ from the Billy the Kid bal- let suite (1941). Both composers form musical impressions of such vast- ness in much the same terms of sparse but continuous and expansive texture: high, quiet, held notes or slowly repeated ones, big registral spaces, not much tonal change.

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