"Finding the Proper Sequence": Form and Narrative in the Collage Music of John Zorn

way to Mike Hammer‘s world, they operate as different facets of that world, as opposed to being constructed as a soundtrack. For Service, the result of Spillane is the ―creation of a character through the accumulation of information in the soundscapes of the narrative sections‖ (77). It would then be the accumulation of all of the musical blocks that presents the final outcome of the piece. He sees Zorn‘s piece as an example of the kind of development that Zorn hears in the un(visually)accompanied cartoon music of Carl Stalling. ―Spillane‘s structure is one of Zorn‘s developments of the ̳block‘ architecture he hears in Stalling‘s soundtracks. Spillane is composed without an accompanying visual track but creates a special kind of narrative logic, analogous to the experience of listening to a cartoon soundtrack ̳in the abstract. ‘ Spillane, then, may be interpreted as Zorn‘s realization of the ̳new dimension‘ he hears in Stalling‘s soundtracks‖ (58). Zorn‘s conception of narrative in his own music, however, seems to go one step further. The composer himself clearly believes in a perceptible narrative generated by the doesn‘t know how dead he is. He runs after you and grabs your gun. You better wake up. ‖ 88 music, as he details in these comments about his ―block structure‖ compositions. 53 ―Most of my work involves the manipulation of musical blocks, of moments . something that Stravinsky was famous for and something that Stockhausen maybe took another step, with moment form. Each moment is complete in itself, like building blocks. And the moments are positioned one after the other in a linear fashion so that it ends up telling a story [italics mine]‖ (Zorn 2004). Here, Zorn seems to be indicating that while there is no traditional musical development in the collage, the necessarily linear construction of the work results in the piece presenting some species of musical narrative. This idea corresponds with Zorn‘s interest in ―finding the proper sequence‖ in which to order the blocks of the collage (quoted in Brackett, xvi). In the works, even in the presence of extra musical associations, ―sound is primary‖ (Zorn 2004). It therefore can be assumed that the arrangement of segments in Zorn‘s collages presents some sort of narrative that can be understood through musical means alone, without recourse to any extramusical associations. In order to explore the nature of this structure, I will examine a more expansive collage piece of Zorn‘s, his string quartet Cat O’Nine Tails. Segmenting “Cat O’Nine Tails” Zorn composed Cat O’Nine Tails on commission from the Kronos Quartet in 1988. The string quartet, like ―Speedfreaks,‖ ―Krazy Kat,‖ and ―American Psycho,‖ is a 53 Other times, however, Zorn speaks more abstractly about the effect of his block structure pieces. ―[Sculpture in the Theater of Musical Optics] relates a lot to my ideas about form and structure, the idea of blocks, the idea of cartoons: Things that appear in succession, and are very different from one another, can spark thinking patterns‖ (quoted in Gagne 1993, 515). 89 collage that features abrupt changes between contrasting musical segments. This style of composition grew in part from Zorn‘s earlier explorations into organized improvisations that he calls ―game pieces. ‖ He states that, ―I had begun to hear sections of music created in the game pieces in very specific combinations and wanted to orchestrate them in a more controlled way‖ (Zorn, quoted in McCutchan 1999, 164). This led to what Zorn calls his ―file-card‖ or ―block-structure‖ works, in which he composed musical moments individually, and then assembled the piece by arranging the moments sequentially. Originally (as with Spillane and Godard) the file-card pieces were not fully notated, but consisted of sketches that were further developed in the studio during rehearsal and recording. In these cases, Zorn considers the recording of the piece to be the final score, as the tape is the only representation of the completely realized piece (166). Cat O’Nine Tails is a file-card work, but was designed for live performance instead of being sonically constructed in the recording studio. Because the piece was composed for a classically trained string quartet, Zorn transferred the final arrangement of file cards into a conventional score. In an interview with William Duckworth, Zorn described his compositional approach to the piece. With Cat O’Nine Tails, I worked out that I wanted the piece to deal with collage elements, cartoon elements, noise elements, improvisational elements, and interludes. And I decided that there were going to be twelve of each of them, sixty sections, and they would be ordered in some way. And I knew what the cartoon stuff would be like; that‘s in my head day and night. It‘s always there. With the collage elements, I knew I wanted to draw upon the great string-quartet composers. The improv stuff was going to be permutations of the players. And the interludes would be like interludes, slow and melodic kinds of pieces. At that point, basically, the