All in the Family

Although the relatively recent proliferation of research into musical contour theory has indeed yielded a plethora of vital analytical and methodological insights, a crucial phenomenological problem therein remains to be fully addressed: its implicit reliance upon what Michael Friedmann (A Methodology for the Discussion of Contour, 1985) has described as a “nonsynchronous” analytical perspective, whereby a contour’s constituent elements, though ordered in time, are in fact interpreted as fully and simultaneously present entities. The musical processes that these contours describe (melodies, rhythms, etc.), however, obviously do not present themselves in this manner – their constituent elements occur in direct succession, not simultaneously. Such contours, therefore, cannot be regarded as truly autonomous musical objects; rather, they represent but a single link – albeit, the crucial, culminating link – in a cumulative transformational chain of contours. The contour ⟨1023⟩, for instance, begins as the singleton ⟨0⟩ and evolves successively into ⟨10⟩ (its first two elements) and ⟨102⟩ (its first three elements) before coming to exist as such. This article develops a system of contour relations that is fully contingent upon this implicit transformational process. First, a sexually “reproductive” model for contour generation is employed to construct a universal contour “family tree”, which provides the foundation for relating contours based on their common “ancestry”. After briefly outlining the fundamental mechanics involved in these kinds of relations, this transformational-genealogical methodology is implemented in order to shed some light on a crucial motivic passage in the first of Alban Berg’s Altenberg Lieder op. 4, thereby illustrating both the efficacy and utility of the approach.