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Sicut in Prologo
Evangelium Secundum Lucam

Date

7,18-7,22 2020

Instrumentation

Natural Voice

Length

3:30 ± 30

Note on Notation

Comments

Influenced somewhat by diacritical systems in Semitic adjabs, I've augmented my initial red diacritics with complamentary blue ones, which serve to modify the phonetic notation without rendering it obscenely complex in such a way that it leaves the realm of the natural, untrained voice.

All these sounds, whether singing, speaking, or intoning are all natural ways the human voice expresses itself, which is an interest I have been developing in my engagement with Parmenides, Xenophanes, and personal studies of Partch's early corporeality, which is apparent in the works of The Wayward and those that came before; moreover, I have found these ideas echoed in my own interests in the varied forms of Christian chant and their reciting tones, that being a sort of music that is not one composed, from the intellect, but rather a collection of patterns used, or even simply things experienced, in a certain arrangement.

In my studies I came to understand that Partch's early musical language was a merging of two compositional poles, which I noted as:

Phonetic (Objective-Subjective) - the phonetic sound of speech as it is, with no altered inflection, determines the melodic line.

Expressive (Subjective-Objective) - the way in which one reads the text, moved by a rhetorical or emotional quality, alters the inflection of speech and determines the melodic line.

In other words, the former category assumes an objective stance—the true phonetic sound—but the comprehension and interpretation of that sound is subjective, based upon one’s perceptual faculty; however, the latter assumes a subjective stance—the inflection of a syllable being incongruous with its true phonetic sound—so that, because the speaker is consciously aware of that inflection, the comprehension of that sound is objective.

Thus, I was able to, in some sense, hone in on Partch's similarities with Xenophanes' statements of seeing: that what is is put there for us to sense and, more importantly, come to know. If one comes to these without prior conceptions or suppositions, then one might be able to walk away with a closer connection to the truth, whatever our flawed senses can make of it. To be like Partch is to intimately engage with the world in all its sounds, because it does not crop and frame itself, but lays itself bare for one to take in its totality; it is man who crops it, frames it, and hangs it on the wall; it is man who has the gall to call that "art!"

Sean Patrick Ignatius Tartaglia