Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 12

The Conclusion -- "Lewis Carroll's Trousers" (337-38) -- is decidedly disappointing, despite its apparent promise to drive the sartorial point home, from hats to trousers. Schachter does nothing more than repeat his point with a couple new images -- an art historian writing in 1969 saying much what Schachter already did but in reference to shapes in a visual field (how exactly does the visual analogy prove the validity of the visual prop for a musical analogy?). Since asymmetrical figures look different upside down, therefore it is clear that, "in tonal music, with its gravitationally charged pitch space, linear shapes are also 'non-commutative.' In principle, ascent tends to mean beginnings and intensifications, whereas descent means endings and resolutions" (337). Let the unmarked term stand for all.

I take the charitable way out: Schachter tries an argument by accumulation: repeat your point often enough and it will seem to be proven. Since he had only an opposition to work with, the pendulum could have swung at any time to the marked term (the joyful playground of the post-structuralists). Since he was wholly committed to one term, there was no real way to address the issue directly. Just as I assume he refrained from making any jokes about "upside down" to his Australian audience -- it was, after all, the experience of sailing around the world that drove home the point for once and all that gravity-as-down was a schema that cultures needed to grow out of (in favor perhaps of center-periphery, one of the schemata in Saslaw's list), or else needed to make far more complex than a simple opposition.