RE: [microsound] random thought

[Danny Wyatt <danny@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Miau-Miau International [mailto:miaumiau@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
>
>any events organized in time = music
>film = visual music
>speech = lexical music
>organic life processes = physiological music
>planetary motion = cosmic music
>


Kurt, the remainder of your post, which I've excised, is very lyrical.  But
my background is literature and literary theory so I would form the equation
any = text and would paraphrase a professor I had by saying that "any signs
organized in time = narrative."

But (again), looking for a sound-bite from that professor I find these:

On literature's characteristic of "expansion" (the establishing of an
equivalence "between a word and a sequence of words... by transforming one
sign into several, which is to say by deriving from one word a verbal
sequence with that word's defining features" (47)):

"In its simplest form the expansion may be made up entirely of repetitive
sequences (an acient rhetorical device aptly labelled _amplificatio_), which
serve equally, and often simultaneously, to create rhythm and to insert
descriptive discourse into a narrative." (49)

And, going into specifics about a Ponge poem:

"The _finit_ vs. _commence_ opposition at the end, as a narrative, i.e.,
sequential transform of the title, separates them once again, in the reverse
order of a _da capo_ movement, as if the text, after rising from _appareil_
to _apparat_, ends by descending from _apparat_ to_appareil_." (133)

(Riffaterre, Michael.  _The Semiotics of Poetry_.  Bloomington:  Indiana UP,
1978.)

To speak of narrative, and narrative elaborations of significance, this
text--which is not a text of literature but rather a text about
literature--uses literature's characteristic of expansion.  The words
"amplificatio," "rhythm," and "_da capo_ movement" all elaborate the seme of
"music" which orbits somewhere the sememe of narrative.

biting my tail,
Danny