Intertextual resonances: imaginary, motivation and musical discourse in composition
Daniel Mendes – [email protected]
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
This abstract built upon my research on music composition from the perspective of intertextuality. Regarding the creative process interaction with some sort of expressive memory of the composer, to which I may refer as sound imaginary. I approach this interaction between musical discourse and sound imaginary as a process of intertextuality, an expressive communication in music. I reflect on creative process of two original compositions showing the uses and functions of the intertextuality in creative process.
The approach I present here began at my first classes of composition, when I was oriented to start a new composition after an analytical reflection on a specific piece. It was the first formulations attempting to define a process of perception, reflection and response as a compositional matter with the aim of establishing a creative interaction with the sound imaginary. The sound imaginary is defined by any tools, references, technical and esthetical determinants, the composer’s experience carries - his expressive intentions. My hypothesis is the musical discourse gathers characteristics of the imaginary to which it interacts, characterizing it as an intertextual musical discourse. Observing that all rules, constrains, structures used in compositional process is in some way a reference to this dialogical process, the sense and meaning of a discourse is always found in a web of relations and references to other discourses, as Korsyn says (2003, 36): “intertextual approaches suggest that meaning occurs between texts, not within them”.
Although the term intertextuality is not found on Bakhtin’s writes, in the bibliography that share the dialogical aspect of music it is more frequent. I use it as general term referring to the sense of musical discourse bounded by others discourses. The composer’s relations with his imaginary, the intertextual perceptive of composition, can be understood in Bakhtin’s words:
Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the ‘soul’ of the speaker and does not belong only to him. The author has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (Bakhtin 1986, 121-122).
I use the term musical discourse to refer to all musical composition, the flux of sounds in time, bounded by a form and considered done by an author. The concept of musical discourse refers to the flux of sounds as the flux of the words in a text (Lima 1999, 55), relating it to a conception of form. Musical discourse is a dialog with the sound imaginary inside a musical form.
Intertextuality is already a way to analyzing music, but just a few efforts are intended to approach practical perspective. I bring two original compositions to argue that intertextuality should be also a way to compose music.
Meu Amigo Tiago, for flute and guitar, was created after my expressive interaction with the Led Zeppelin’s song Friends. I was fixed on some aspects of this rock song somehow I wished to express it. The chromaticism of the harmony, the non-tonal melody, hybridism references to the Marroquin music and the appeal to periodicity was the main expressive intent I could feel from this song and to which I dialog. Although there is quotation of the song, such as pitch classes from the melody and instrumental gestures from the rhythm guitar, the intertextuality here don’t refers to this compositional technique, but to construct of the internal rules, constrains and expressivity of my discourse in dialogue with the song. That set class was a way to evidence the same hybridism I hear on the song. The instrumental gesture quoted takes the sound energy of the Led Zeppelin song to my very own composition. The chromaticism in Zeppelin means hybridism and intertextual references, and so does Meu Amigo Tiago. Both my process of composition and my sound imaginary is dialoguing the same words with the same meaning (paraphrasing Klein 2005, 105).
In Bagatelas for sax quartet-mov II, the intertextual process was different because my sound imaginary was not a specific piece, but the expressive intention I carry from my earlier musical lessons as a heavy metal guitarist. In this compositional process I was actually composing a metal riff, but by somehow, motivated by a possibility of break the predicable logic of riff-metal-guitar and to explore, in compositional means, a new sonority of that feeling already known in metal music. The main issues in this process were how transposing stylistics of “a short melodic ostinato which may be repeated… to accommodate an underlying harmonic pattern” (Bradford 2010, §1) to a sax quartet and keep the rhetoric sense of a heavy metal riff.
A stylistic of metal music is representing heaviness in riffs: the metrical irregularity of phrases alternated to a low pedal tone (the guitar’s 6th or 7th string, in a range of tuning from the usual E2, to even a A1) and the constant references to diminished triads and major 7th intervals, as seen in Sepultura’s Dead Embrionic Cells (among many others), is frequently used in that expressive motivation. This stylistics characteristics and gestural patterns shared between wide traditions can be categorized in some way to form of them a conceptual category: a topic of heavy riff (Klein 2005, 62). The process of expressive communication here regards topics as a compositional tool.
This two briefs reflection shows possibilities of regarding intertextuality’s uses and functions on compositional process, intended to confirm the hypothesis that this analytical concept can and should be also a composer’s practices.
