Skilbeck, Ruth (2006), The Writer's Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity. PhD thesis. University of Technology Sydney library, Sydney, Australia.
PRELUDE: The Writer’s Fugue
Canon
The Latin word fuga refers to ‘flight’,
‘fleeing’, ‘to chase’. The source of the word ‘fugue’, fuga, originally stood
for what musicologists now call ‘canon’ (Horsley 1966:6). The word canon (rule)
originated in Pythagorean philosophy.
Pythagorean inquiries were predominantly mathematical: ‘arithmetic
construed as an investigation into the patterns of numbers, geometry construed
as an investigation into metrical patterning of shapes, and harmony construed
as an investigation into the patterning of musical intervals’ (Hamlyn 1987/8:
18).
Pythagorean harmony addressed properties
of musical intervals, it could be related to arithmetic and geometry because
the ‘relations between various musical intervals could be discovered by
comparison to the lengths of strings which, when plucked, produced the
different tones’ (Hamlyn 1988: 18). From this mathematical analogue developed a
mystical belief by some Pythagoreans that similarities between mathematical
principles – likenesses – could be seen in many different things. Pythagoreans
entertained the mystical belief that as the planets moved through the heavens they
made a divine music of too high a frequency for the human ear to hear. From this application of commensurability,
developed the theory that the universe was ordered entirely according to
rational (mathematical) principles that, so to speak, articulated divine order
or will to a ‘perfect’ plan. The Pythagoreans' discovery of incommensurables
(‘numbers such as root two, which cannot be expressed in terms of a rational
fraction’ (ibid.)) was considered dangerous to society.
The word ‘canon’ in Pythagoras’s usage
‘refers specifically to the template used to mark off the harmonic divisions in
the monochord’ (Johnson 2004: 147). The Pythagoreans believed that the study of
number and harmony would lead to gnosis (wisdom), that the mathematical
patterns in the natural world ‘reflect the archetypal laws on which all
phenomena are based’ (ibid.).
The conceptualisation of canon (as rule)
influenced Greek Rhetoric, as codified by the Roman writer Quintilian (1920),
wherein there are five canons (rules) evoking harmonic principles: invention, arrangement, style, memory and
delivery. They evoke the harmonic principles of ordering by intervals used in
musical composition. They also stipulate the ‘rules’, the social conventions or
laws of language use for discourse in political and forensic oratory, and to
some extent for criticism of the arts of drama and poetry.
The historical development of canon in
different settings invokes the principle of
harmonic ordering given tangible expression in music, rational categorization
and the setting of rules or laws in language, and an inter-connected mystical
belief (incommensurable to modern sensibility) in the authoritative divine
ordering of the universe.
Resurrecting this beginning-etymology of
the word ‘canon’ there have been parallels and inter-relationships between the
development of musical language, and the uses and functions of language as
social, political, philosophical and critical discourse in western culture. The
issue for modern artistic literary uses of musical concepts is not only how but
why creative literary artists have used fugal musicalization in significant
literary narratives of Romanticism and Modernism.
(Skilbeck 2006: 5-6)
©Copyright Ruth Skilbeck
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