Shedding Scales: Understanding Intervals in Different Musical Contexts

Abstract

music of the twentieth century, most notably that which was loosed upon the world by Arnold Schoenberg's 'emancipation of the dissonance,' has been dismissed as cerebral patterning, devoid of visceral expression or the physicality of human experience. Such a reaction stems from a tangle of historical and music-theoretical roots, one strand of which involves the ways we understand intervals between pitches. In what follows, I shall try to unravel some of the assumptions underlying our understanding of intervals as a way of broadening our experience of them in different musical contexts.1 In doing so, I will try to expose the sources of some of the metaphors we use to characterize intervallic behavior, examining what Mark Johnson (1987) has referred to as the image schemata we tend to employ in describing intervals. By testing some of the sets of metaphors we use to characterize intervals in scale-based music, I hope both to broaden our thinking about intervals in scales, and to challenge the simple transference of such sets of metaphors to our experience of aggregate-based music.2 I will close by offering some ideas towards a new metaphorical framework from which we can begin to develop a more lively sense of intervals in certain post-tonal musics.

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