'Entropy' ...Bird Lives [or, rather, Ornette lives]

[Mutualcode at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/7/2003 6:38:03 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
studiovheissu at yahoo.com writes:


> On the recording, then, pianist Norris attends to the chord changes
> that Ornette and the group selected; in solo, however, [trumpet player
> Don] Cherry and Ornette and the group can escape the changes to play
> freely. 

The building itself is threatening to become a thematic
chord, it seems to me. The third and fourth stories are 
pulling against the structure of the whole in an effort to 
establish, from their own perspectives, polyphonic freedom.

Saul breaks into the third story, disguised as a second
story-man, and Aubade breaks out of the fourth story to
meld with the enveloping sea of 37 degrees F.

The tension between harmony and polyphony, between
chords and counterpoint, resonates with the "story's"
structure. Is it harmony or counterpoint? Both, natch, if
the pynch is true to form (his form, our expectations, the 
form of a short-story, what the theme demands, etc., all
feeding back to the deadly tonic waiting to close us all
out- whst certainty demands).

This was covered in high modern style by Thomas Mann
in _Doctor Faustus_. Here, for example:

       One day he brought to latter's amusement, the discovery 
       he had made himself of double counterpoint. That is, he 
       gave to his teacher to read two parts running simultaneously, 
       each of which could for  One day the beginner in the theory 
       of harmony brought to Kretschmar, to the m the upper or the
       lower part and thus were interchangeable. "If you have got the 
       triple counterpoint," said Kretschmar, "keep it for youself. I 
       don't want to hear about your rashness."

       He kept much to himself, sharing his especially his absorption 
       in the problem of unity, interchangeability, identity of horizontal 
       and vertical writing….

       "…he would talk to me about these magic diversions of his idle 
       time: of the transformation of the horizontal into the vertical, the 
       successive into the simultaneous. Simultaneity, he asserted, 
       was here the primary element; for the note, with its more immediate 
       and more distant harmonics, was a chord in itself, and the scale 
       only the analytical unfolding of the chord into the horizontal row.

       But the real chord, consisting of several notes, it is after all 
       something different. A chord is meant to be followed up by another, 
       and so soon as you do it, carry it over into another, each one of its 
       component notes becomes a voice-part. I find that in a chordal 
       combination of notes one should never see anything but the result 
       of the movement of voices and do honour to the part as implied in 
       the single chord-note- but not honour the chord as such, rather
       despise it as subjective and arbitrary, so long as it cannot prove 
       itself to be the result of part-writing. The chord is no harmonic 
       narcotic but polyphony in itself, and the notes that form it are 
parts. 
       But I assert they are that the more, and the polyphonic character 
       of the chords is the the more pronounced, the more dissonants it is. 
       The degree of dissonance the measure of its polyphonic value. The 
       more discordant a chord is, the more notes it contains contrasting 
       and conflicting with each other, the more polyphonic it is, and the 
       more markedly every single note bears the stamp of the part already   
       the part already in the simultaneaous sound-combination."
[DF, Mann, trans: H.T. Lowe-Porter, Vintage Books, pp73-74.].

And what is the connection between harmony/polyphony and entropy,
you might ask? Good question. Something to do with our notions of
order and randomness, I'd imagine, but I'm not sure. Natch.

With all due resoect...
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