From Circles to Nets: On the Signification of Spatial Sound Imagery in New Music

As Bas van Fraassen observes in his introduction to the philosophy of time and space, ‘‘with respect to space, it is not easy to make a plausible preliminary list of basic relations’’ (van Fraassen 1985). And yet we try: the number of studies of spatial topics has gradually increased with the evergrowing variety of thematic subcategories and types of approaches. In the domain of music, theorists like to discuss ‘‘musical space,’’ usually equating it with a two-dimensional pitch-time space, not the space of performance (e.g., Kurth 1969, originally published 1931; Bernard 1983, 1987; Lerdahl 1988; cf. Harley 1994a). In the area of electroacoustics, we deal with sound projection spaces and composed spaces, the latter being integral to the compositions themselves. Still different types of spatial imagery are represented by sonorities or hinted at by the works’ titles (e.g., Krzysztof Penderecki’s Dimensions of Time and Silence, 1961; Witold Lutoslawski’s Les espaces du sommeil, 1975; Kaija Saariaho’s Lichtbogen, 1985– 1996; Joan La Barbara’s Space Testing, 1977). In other words, there are a plurality of ‘‘spaces’’ that might be associated with music. An insight into this diversity of spaces is provided by Francis Dhomont’s poetic program notes for his electroacoustic composition Espace/Escape (1989), which has the word ‘‘space’’ in its title and explores the associative and symbolic aspects of space and movement: