More to recomposition

Today's post is a reaction to Matthew Bailey-Shea's article on recomposition in Music Theory Online. He takes several settings of a poem by Goethe and performs a "mash up," generating a self-styled "musical Frankenstein" (para. 22) that you can both see and hear (there is an audio file). His argument is quite similar to Agawu's in promoting (re)composition-as-analysis, but Bailey-Shea is bolder in speaking to the value (not just utility) of the results.

. . . although there are a variety of goals for music analysis, one of the most common is to suggest new ways to hear a given piece. Such analyses succeed, moreover, when the proposed ways of hearing challenge us in a creative, insightful, and thought-provoking manner. And though intertextual analyses often succeed through simple verbal description there are good reasons to literally compose the proposed connections. We actually hear how these songs resonate with one another, comment upon and affect one another, reach out and engage other settings of the poem. The spark of intertextual association becomes far brighter and, in a way, the music speaks for itself. The analysis informs the music; the music is an analysis. (para. 7)

The resonance with my own posts (locate them with the label "recomposition") is obvious. My task is much simpler than merging elements from several setting into a single performable song, since the individual pieces remain distinct in a dance chain or even a suite for performance. Still, as he puts it, "Every manipulation, every distortion [was] designed to enhance our experience of these songs, both as individual compositions and as a group" (para. 22), and the same is true of any gathering of dances in a sequence: they cast light on each other, as it were.

Here is an example. I have taken three A major waltzes from D365 and added D779n13 to them, in its 16-bar version. The six dances are to be played in order, the idea being that the alternate dances are placed in relation to one another by the dance & (multiple) trio principle. So, the similar first strains of n17 and n28 are shown together, but the topical underpinnings of their markedly different second strains ("foot-stamping" in the first, "yodeling" in the second) are brought into relief. Likewise the "trios": leading-tone basses and initial dissonances of n30, n16, and -- after a restatement of the "dance" (n28 again rather than the original n17) -- D779n13.

Tomorrow's post will show two other re-compositions of a similar kind, utilizing dances from D783.