Pathway, Blockage, and Containment in Density 21.5

Abstract

twentieth-century work has inspired more metaphorical description than Edgard Varese's Density 21.5. Theorists have ascribed to it energy, impulse, and climax, describing it as holding back, surging forward, breaking out, and shooting off in new directions.1 Such evocative language offers a refreshing antidote to the formalities of set-theoretic analysis, suggesting that the work, despite its abstract title, expresses dynamic, even human, qualities. But it also presents us with new questions: how do we bridge the gap between metaphorical description and theoretical explanation? What does it mean to claim that the melodic line has an upward urge, or that one note pursues another, or replaces another as a goal? Mark Johnson's The Body in the Mind provides a conceptual framework within which such questions can be meaningfully addressed.2 Johnson suggests that we find meaning in our world in part by mapping image schemas patterns derived from our embodied experience onto patterns in more abstract domains. Such features of our embodied experience as force, motion, pathway, containment, blockage, and balance provide a rich store of image-schematic structure that can be mapped onto music, giving it metaphorical meaning and coherence. Music particularly lends itself to this sort of mapping, since changes in intensity, duration, and pitch translate easily into changes in physical force and motion. These changes can then be interpreted at higher metaphorical levels by mapping them onto image schemas like those shown in Figure 1 . This article has three aims: (1) to outline a theoretical model, applicable to both tonal and atonal music, that can be used to guide the mapping of musical patterns onto such image schemas; (2) to apply this model to Density 21.5, a work with both tonal and atonal features; and (3) to show how earlier metaphorical descriptions of this work provide empirical support for the model, suggesting that the model can help to clarify and refine metaphorical insights reached through intuition.3 The analysis will focus on the opening seventeen measures, a section of the piece that has been noted for its particular musical cohesiveness. As the analysis will show, this cohesiveness can be explained by mapping the passage onto an image schema for goal-directed motion, resulting in its interpretation as a series of goal-directed actions, culminating in the attainment of the climactic G in measure 17.

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