The Sum of the Parts (Sometimes Divided)

A few weeks ago I wrote about movements and the impact of “movementing” on the experience of musical forms; more recently, I’ve been confronting the opposite process, that of gathering a number of small pieces into a larger collection the likes of Schumann’s various Blätter. Maybe someone with a better grasp on 19th-century musicology than I can summarize for us the aesthetic and economic considerations behind these groupings of short works; in any case, I doubt they align too closely with the reasons one might decide in 2011 to pursue the same constellation.

Without neglecting the convenience furnished by the modularity of the small pieces I’m working on now—they could occupy any amount of program space from three minutes to fifteen, which, in a crass way, is a potentially helpful feature—the main attraction, for me, is that it allows me to organize my pieces (which furnish five accounts of the same musical-semiotic operation) into a sort of bulleted list. Certainly a movemented piece can fulfill this same rhetorical function; however, the implication with such a collection of pieces is that their individual material content doesn’t determine how many of them there should be or in what order they should be presented. Obviously there’s a kind of second-order rhetoric to consider in this case—should we open big and close with a subtle gesture or vive versa?—but it’s not like the last piece is the ending of some narrative that the first piece sets in motion.

This is a very tentative and preliminary broaching of the topic; the structuring of subdivisions within a piece of music merits a much more thorough theorizing than I’ve given it in these two posts. I’d be curious to know what you all think.