Connections

I’m taking a break from SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION today, because there’s a cool thing about Prelude (no fugue) No. 6 that I almost appended to the last post, but it was too long.

Over on Twitter, I have a collection of quotes and images that I’ve set up to be randomly selected as tweets. About 50 of them are from my 50 Postcard Project collection, wherein I have wasted art supplies on small pieces of cardboard and scribbled words on/for them.

Here’s the one that we’re talking about today:

“Always expect CONNECTIONS when you are in RITUAL.”

No one has ever questioned what the hell I was talking about with this postcard, which I regard as a signal failing of all you people. I shall now explain it anyway.

The central image is that of an 11-circuit labyrinth, i.e., if you walk the labyrinth, you will circle the center eleven times before reaching it. The red is the “seed pattern”:

It’s pretty simple (though the drawing of the outer circles can get dicey): just draw a little arc between the top of the central cross and the next line, and then continue connecting the next line/dot, back and forth. Here’s the complete process.

(For the simpler 7-circuit labyrinth, leave out one of the “angle braces” at each corner.)

So what does this have to do with either the music or the Greek key pattern (also known as a meander)?

We’ll take the meander pattern first. Incredibly, if you take a set of two meanders and rotate them, stretching their lines into circles, you get a 7-circuit labyrinth. Here’s an animation of that. I’d love to know who figured that out and how.

Now, the music.

In his book Labyrinths: ancient myths and modern uses, Sig Lonegren takes an 11-circuit labyrinth and labels each circuit with a note of the chromatic scale, starting with A on the outer ring and progressing to G# in the center.

If you walk the labyrinth, the notes you encounter in order produce the 12-tone row [ C# – A# – B – C– A – D – G – E – F – F# – D# – G# ], which is the musical notation at the top of the card.

What does it sound like? It sounds like the opening of Prelude (no fugue) No. 6, because when it came time to write the “finale” of Six Preludes (no fugues), I knew I wanted something I could build variations on, and this was pertinent to my interest. Here’s how that went down. (Note the ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS! And note how the first one went on to become the third movement of the Cello Sonata.)

There’s also a musical joke here, since the tone row sounds as if it ought to be the opening subject of a fugue. I even shift into the dominant key with a lead-in phrase that should turn into the second statement of the fugue. But it doesn’t; it just shifts into the first variation. This “no fugue” actually gets a chuckle from music freaks in performance.

(I have also used this theme as a motif in Seven Dreams of Falling, the unfinished opera about the fall of Icarus and the Minotaur. You can hear it as the bass line of the chorale in the opening scene, and again as the funky saxophone growl in Ariadne’s aria “My mother, bored and pampered.”)

If you’re still fascinated — surely you must be, all this talk of RITUAL and CONNECTION — here’s one last (very long) story about this music with a boffo synchronicity. Scan this blog post (just to get the context), and then read the end of this one.

Actually, there are a lot of very good ideas discussed in that second post. Read the whole thing.