can bilir

Cosmopolitics of Pitch in Zaïde /Adama Fragments

Dr. Can Bilir

cb698@cornell.edu

Abstract

In 2004, Chaya Czernowin was commissioned to complete the unfinished Mozart opera Zaïde for the 2006 Salzburg Festival. Contrary to the historical practice of completing the missing parts, Czernowin composed a parallel opera for performance on the same stage with completely different music, a different cast, and a different orchestra; this was an assemblage she titled Zaïde /Adama. The music of Zaïde and Adama are distant to each other. In comparison to the tonal music of Zaïde, Adama constitutes a palette of complex sounds that are predominantly produced from acoustical instruments, the voice and speech of the singers, and objects such as a plastic bottle and a bucket of stones. Adama, like Czernowin’s other works, does not explicitly exhibit tonal centers and pitch hierarchies in cognitive terms. On the other hand, pitch, as an abstraction of collective and definitive auditory stimulations that is embodied in cognition as a musical generative kernel, has two particular roles in the coalescence of Zaïde and Adama. Zaïde’s tonal centers and trajectories have musical parallels in Adama in terms of keynote invariance, and dissonances through the pitch combinatoriality as a collection of abstract limited sets. These musical parallels, along with the libretto and staging, are embraided in the overall expression of the operatic flow and drama. Therefore, the concept of pitch isomorphism represents a very limited reductive plan of the operas that are tightly bound together via reciprocal resonances on themes of violence and femininity in a flux of manifestations of complex auditory multiplicities. Building on this particular ontological difference of approach to pitch on one hand as the isomorphism centered around the reductive manifolding construction and on the other hand non-reductive auditory multiplicities, in this paper I will trace the relations of Zaïde /Adama’s incompatible singulars and multiplicities centered around the subject of pitch. In fact, Chaya Czernowin challenges concepts of the conventional singular musical absolutes in her works, as evidenced in her paper “The Other Tiger” (Czernowin 2011). In the same text, Czernowin draws attention to the transnational identities of new music composers. Therefore, I will further examine these frictions of cosmopolitics between the auditory singulars and rhizomatic multiplicities that are manifested within the Zaïde and Adama assemblage with the critical application of abstractions in terms of Kantian Schematism and relevant manifolding reductive universal systems. This analysis is based on my close reading of the scores of two published editions of Zaïde /Adama, an examination of the video recording of the 2006 version, my observations of the live performance of Zaïde /Adama’s 2017 version, and my personal conversations with Czernowin about this opera in 2017–2018. I further investigate the concept of imperfect-consonance with the framework of Neo-Riemannian theory, Galant Schemata, set theory, and timbral analysis. I suggest the ontological concepts of lines (lines of forces: Latour 1988, lines of flight Deleuze & Guattari 1987) as an aesthetical catalyst that can potentially provide a mediating philosophy towards the theoretical, conceptual, and perceptive incompatibilities between auditory singulars and multiplicities.

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Keywords (5 Items): Zaïde /Adama, Eco-cosmopolitanism, Schematism, Set Theory, Spectral Analysis.

References

(Conference booklet version)

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Czernowin, Chaya. “The Other Tiger.” In The Second Century of New Music; Search Yearbook Volume 1, edited by Cox, Franklin, Daniel Peter Biro, Alexander Sigman, Steven Kazuo Takasugi, 182-189. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011.

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Gjerdingen, Robert O. Music in The Galant Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Krumhansl, Carol L. Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.