Time-Space Synthesis: The Relationship of the Grid to Twentieth- Century Music
6/19/15, 8:14 AM
Time-Space Synthesis: The Relationship of the Grid to Twentieth- Century Music
Paul Paccione [1] "The grid is an emblem of modernity by being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century....." Thus art critic and historian Rosalind Krauss describes the importance of the grid as a structure within the visual arts of the twentieth century. Krauss goes on to state that: "In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral [2] spread of a single surface." The foregoing observations about the grid and its relationship to twentieth-century visual arts could be applied to the temporal arts as well, particularly music. It is in the synthesis of musical time and space that the grid and its geometricized order operates. In modern music, the grid allows for the concept of equivalence of musical space and contributes to the abolishment of the opposition between the horizontal and the vertical aspects of this space. [3] In the visual arts the grid acts as a "mapping of the space inside the frame onto itself." The mapping of the musical space first begins to make its appearance in twentieth-century music in the late serial works of Anton Webern. In these works the unification of all the elements of a composition is regarded as ideal. As a visual structure, the grid is anti-narrative and rejects sequential reading. This absence of discourse, and rejection of both thematicism and hierarchical order, is explored in music in the works of the so-called Minimalist composers (Riley, Reich, Glass, Feldman, Young). A number of these composers have either employed grids as a concrete element of their music (for example, Feldman's early graphic music scores) or have worked with visual artists whose motif is the grid (for example, Philip Glass and Sol Le Witt). In the work of these composers time has ceased to be ordered according to what composer Philip Glass describes as the [4] "traditional concepts of recollection and anticipation." It is the ambiguity of metric accent (strong-weak) and the absence of the traditional dependency on periodicity in this music that contributes to this loss of directionality. (Again, this characteristic can be traced back to the music of Webern, where the barline begins to serve more as a frame for the structuring of the musical space than a metrical division.) Finally, it is the repetitiousness and unity of the grid that exerts strong influence on the musical space. This paper will explore the grid as a spatial model in twentieth-century music. It will trace the development of this relationship beginning with the music of Anton Webern and extending through present-day minimalist composers. Grids have become important modes of organization for recent art. Rosalind Krauss writes that: "By discovering the grid, Cubism, de Stijl, Mondrian, Malevich ... landed in a place that was out of reach of everything that went before. Which is to say, they landed in the present and everything else was declared the [5] past." For these painters the grid emphasized a drawing style that stressed the materialness of the physical file:///Users/paulpaccione/Desktop/Writings/Time-Space%20Synthesis:…p%20of%20the%20Grid%20to%20Twentieth-%20Century%20Music.webarchive
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