Hysteria at the Musical Surface

[1] Just a little bit of theory can create a good deal of anxiety. Throughout its modern disciplinary history, American music theory has maintained a predilection for meta-theoretical critique, often shrouded in any number of assorted anxieties. Unity, prolongation, organicism, and symmetry have each garnered their share of attention in music-theoretical meta-discourse, even as these very concepts continue to make up the heart of analytical methods still employed (sometimes uncritically) in contemporary scholarship. The recent debate in Music Theory Online over the nature and efficacy of Klumpenhouwer Networks (hereafter, K-nets) in the analysis of post-tonal music is representative of and, indeed, instructive in its engagement with methodological anxiety.(1)[2] In four short meditations, I will engage implicit ideological frameworks articulated by various positions in the K-net debate, problematizing their assumptions and qualifying their proposals for further research. The recent dialogue on K-nets has left some properties of the analytical system unexplored and some aspects of the analytical process undertheorized. It is my contention that both sides in the K-net debate make recourse to a "musical surface" that has received insufficient critical attention. Directly engaging this concept, I will suggest ways in which future work on K-nets might proceed.I. On Promiscuity[3] Michael Buchler's recent Music Theory Online article, "Reconsidering Klumpenhouwer Networks," challenges the analytical technique developed by Henry Klumpenhower and David Lewin on two basic counts. Buchler asserts that K-nets have the potential to "open a Pandora's Box of relational permissiveness;"(2) this aspect of Buchler's K-net critique is concerned with the ability of K-nets to act as a cipher, particularly for trichords. This first aspect is related to a second, which sees the K-net model's design as an affordance for its relational permissivity. Both critiques, however, are to be understood as a corrective to the theory's purported abstractness. Buchler is most concerned with "try[ing] to have our networks reflect the musical surface to the greatest degree possible."(3)[4] Bucher claims that of the 78 possible pairs of trichords, 78.8% can form isographic K-nets with one another. Two lines of inquiry follow from Buchler's assertion: 1) the truth content and nature of Buchler's claim itself and 2) the implications for a "promiscuous" or flexible analytical relationship. In his response to Buchler, Shaugn O'Donnell notes that it is only the three-note set classes that relate to one another 78.8% of the time. Three-note pitch-class sets, by contrast, relate to one another only 10.5% of the time, even with the use of O'Donnell's double emploi.(4) Yet the facts surrounding the relational permissivity of trichordal K-nets seem less than important to the other participants in the debate, who fail to comment on this potential error on Buchler's part and focus instead on the issue of analytical relationships in general. This may be because there is a fair amount of anxiety concerning the claims of the analytical method at hand, or any analytical method at all. If it is true that K-nets are able show relationships (almost) wherever we would like them to, then analysts must decide if this is to the method's credit or detriment.[5] Phil Stoecker and Gretchen Foley address idiosyncratic scenarios in order to provide a foil for Buchler's broadly written critique. Stoecker, in a dialectical turn, explores the unique properties of moments in which it is not possible to show a trichordal K-net relationship. Foley importantly points out particular situations in Perlean theory where K-nets show relationships that other analytical tools miss.[6] O'Donnell, having already demonstrated that K-nets do in fact show significant relationships, nonetheless "embraces" their relational promiscuity, asserting that "music analysis is like storytelling," and that "the relational abundance generated by K-nets further emphasizes that musicality, whatever that means in a given context, is in the hands and ears of the analyst rather than the theoretical apparatus itself. …