Thursday, 1 October 2009

Prolongation

I've been thinking a lot about prolongation in music - particularly since I started playing around with these 'string' improvisations. In music we talk of prolongation in many ways: prolongation in terms of duration; the prolongation of musical ideas (through repetitition); the prolongation of pitch structure (through some Schenkerian process). What is prolongation?

In society, we have prolongation of social structure, produced through reproduction and transformation. If I hold a string sound for 10 seconds, it precisely reproduces and transforms (at every instant it is different) a musical context (which might be the analogue of social structure).

Is it 'the difference that makes the difference that keeps the difference being made'...?

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