Sunday, February 23, 2014

Models Are What We Learn, Not Substance

Ever since I was about five and someone gave me a toy plastic sailboat I have had a hunger for the real thing.  Why build a model of a sailboat that has none of the qualities of a real sailboat?  And why, of all the bad ideas, give it to a child?

It puzzled me throughout my formal education that so much emphasis was spent on mastering the models and so little attention paid to what the models represented.

Tonal Refraction is a model, but a model of the real thing, in that it represents what is heard, not the mechanics either of structure or the means of producing the sound.  It models an invisible sequence of events, sensible only to the listening ear, swimming in a sea of resonances impossible to predict or identify.

How many times in making a Tonal Refraction of a composition I think I know have I made the same mistake: i.e., predicted the length of a given tone, or its recurrence in a clearly sequential passage?

We are quickly lulled into the relative passivity of focusing on the active part of tones, the attack, while ignoring that other source of activity, the release.  Part of the art of composition is to use those seductions to arouse attention to the true events.

" 'Taint easy, McGee!"