schonberg

Modern composers such as Schonberg threw out the whole idea of expectation. The scales they used deprive us of the notion of a resolution, a root to the scale, or a musical "home," thus creating the illusion of no home, a music adrift, perhaps as a metaphor for a twentieth-century existentialist existence. We still hear these scales used in movies to accompany dream sequences to convey a lack of grounding, or in underwater or outer space scenes to convey weightlessness.

tension : resolution --> contentment

tension : no resolution --> meaninglessness?

narrative : collage

construct : reality

linear : simultaneous

collage as reality, not narrative

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped-up revelation. Life, though—standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the web or a declining relationship, hearing that a close friend died last night at us—flies at us in bright splinters.

Life does not have a “plot”. It is a collage.

Story/narrative seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

I’m not interested in collage as the refuge of the compositionally disabled. I’m interested in collage as an evolution beyond narrative.

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man.

If you grow up not with toys bought in the shop but things that are found around the farm, you do a sort of bricolage. Bits of string and wood. Making all sorts of things, like webs across the legs of a chair. And then you sit there, like the spider.

The main question collage artists face: you’ve found some interesting material—how do you go about arranging it?