I Promise To Care

A few weeks back, I mentioned Jeannie Ma. Guerrero’s recent and quite fascinating Nono article; I wanted to circle around and give it some more shine, because it deserves recognition. The name of the piece is “Non-Conventional Planar Designs in the Works of Nono and Tintoretto,” and it appears in Music Theory Spectrum Vol. 32 no. 1 (Spring 2010). Based on a scrawled postcard from England that Nono seems to have written to himself after a visit to the Shipley, Guerrero draws a remarkable connection between Tintoretto’s converging visual planes and the mystifying refractions of syllabic material in Nono’s choral music. This link furnished a real eureka moment for me: Guerrero offers a way for this music to make sense. Before reading it, I had of course been a major Nono admirer and a genuine fan of his vocal music especially; however, now I have a whole new window on his material at which I certainly wouldn’t have arrived on my own.

I doubt (although I’d love to be proved wrong!) that NewMusicBox is a regular destination for many theorists, so I won’t preach to them—except to say that I wish more articles like this made it into “mainstream” theory publications. More than once I’ve heard music scholars make the same plaintive noise that composers sometimes do, namely that they think nobody cares about their work; I’m here to tell you that I really do care about reading articles like Guerrero’s, articles that adumbrate something mystifying about new music. Please write more of them! I promise to care.

Let me take a moment to recommend Richard Yates’ piece Lost (and concomitant interview) on New Music Scrapbook. As I wrote earlier about Lost, it “sneaks up on the listener from behind, offering surprising revelations seemingly out of nowhere.” Having had some more time to get to know it since its premiere, I can affirm that the experiential fabric of the piece is woven so tightly and in such minute detail that this effect—the emergence of musical information from nothing—is doubly remarkable, because patterns, as it turns out, are everywhere. Don’t miss Richard’s interview either.