| Chapter 1: | Uproarious Prologue |
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Indices of systematicity, such signs body forth their connectivity through ongoing permutations over time. The musical quality of this process suggests a third way of understanding the habitus, an awareness neither physically nor psychologically based. As Victor Zuckerkandl wrote, hearing musical tones means one hears the entire musical system sounding with the event of each note as it reveals its place within the whole system. These events are actions of musical forces, dynamic trajectories announcing the incompletion of each tone and its impending return to stabler positions. The tensions embodied by musical systems are vehicles of a type of dispersed intentionality because the tones indeed signal their need or intent to reach the tonic or move toward other provisional points of stability within the composition.
Although the selection of the tones is a priori a matter of convention, rather than a direct translation of physical properties into culture, still, once the selection is made, physical properties of tones retroactively work in the system. Zuckerkandl insists on musical analysis of sounds in terms of their own volitions to return to the metastable points set by the tonic, in terms of the equilibrating relations between the various structural properties of the sounds. Through them, each tone wants, in varying modalities, to return to the tonic of the piece.
Creation in music is at least as much listening for intentions of tones, as they chunk in expanding segments, as it is projecting one’s preexistent mental dispositions onto material. In short, such a view acknowledges the arbitrariness and variability of cultural systems but also observes that