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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
A translator is not supposed to mind his own business – only that of his author. But when the translator of Regina Busch's brilliant, wide–ranging, and stimulating essay ‘On the Horizontal and Vertical Presentation of Musical Ideas and on Musical Space’ has to struggle not only with the intractable nature of the problem of discussing subtleties of linguistic usage through the medium of language itself – and a different language at that – but with his own linguistic and musical practices; and when these last have been conditioned, on the one hand, by his early training as a physicist and, on the other, by his present activities as a composer of music in the tradition of Schoenberg and Webern; then a certain transgression of the translatorial proprieties may, perhaps, be allowed.
1 In her note to her essay on p. 14 of TEMPO 156, Regina Busch refers to the question of when one hears a simultaneity as a fused chord and when one separates its constituent notes; she cites Lorenz, who applies the concept of ‘depth’ and the word ‘vertical’ to a polyphonic texture in which one must follow the separate lines alongside each other. The fused or separable nature of a given simultaneity depends crucially, however, on the rhythmic, melodic, and timbral independence or otherwise of the whole of the lines creating that simultaneity. (Dare one say, on whether one hears each note of the simultaneity as part of a vertical ‘Gestalt’ – the chord itself – or of a horizontal ‘Gestalt’ – the line? ‘Dare’, because these are unSchoenbergian and unWebernian uses of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’!) A related problem, incidentally, arises in electronic music in distinguishing between a complex of pitches heard as creating a timbre (i.e. the partials of a single sound) and a chord of identifiable, if not consciously separated, notes. Here the relative dynamics and the micro–rhythms – the envelopes – of the partials are of crucial importance. In the instrumental/vocal case, however, it is the whole of the rhythmic configurations and the degrees of similar and contrary melodic motion that create the mental ‘set’ that leads to one way or the other of listening, and the similarities or differences in timbres and dynamics that make one way or the other easy or difficult.
2 Style and Idea, London, 1975 pp. 122, 123Google Scholar.