The Circle and the Diamond: The Odyssey of Music

By Roland Trogan

In The Circle and the Diamond, the authors disaffection with the shortcomings of music analysis leads to the creation of an original contribution to understanding our Western musical heritage. Composer Roland Trogan explicates Susanne Langers notion that music consists of patterns of sentience by extending the notion of harmonic rhythm (rate of chordal change) to the analytical parameters of texture, dynamics, tempo, tonality and form. Changes in the rates of each parameter create patterns, and these correspond to existential and phenomenological patterns in human experience, ranging from mental and emotional states to biorhythms and the course of life itself.
The author also categorizes music according to three temporal estheticscircular/durational, chronological and infinitethat lay behind historical styles, in order to explain how music changes in response to new temporal world-views. Novel perspectives on the compositional use of silence, Arnold Schoenbergs impact on 20th-century music, music notation and the nature of inspiration in music will intrigue composers, academicians and students of music. By virtue of its sociological commentaries and nascent phenomenological descriptions, all readers will find The Circle and the Diamond a trove of stimulating and provocative ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483694740

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Copyright © 2013 by Roland Trogan, Ph.D.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2013917577

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-4836-9473-3

                            Softcover                          978-1-4836-9472-6

                            Ebook                               978-1-4836-9474-0

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Rev. date: 03/28/2014

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Prelude

Chapter 1   Presenting: The Queen

Chapter 2   Form As It Occurs In Tonal Music

Chapter 3   Sonata-Allegro Form: The Architecture Of Vitality

Chapter 4   Literal Repetition Of Sections: Momentum

Chapter 5   Music Textures: The Life Experience

Chapter 6   The Cosmetics Of Music Notation: Fruits Of The Soil

Chapter 7   Rhythmen Of The Epidermis: Dynamics, Tempo, And A Companion

Chapter 8   Silence

Chapter 9   The Characteristics Of The Rhythmen: Discreteness, Synchronicity, And Simultaneity

Chapter 10   Chronological And Circular Time

Chapter 11   Schoenberg’s Wall

Chapter 12   The Dark Age: Popularism And Artistic Frenzy

Chapter 13   The Diamond Aesthetic

Chapter 14   The Divorce

Chapter 15   The Three Magi Of Time

Chapter 16   Inspiration

Dedicated to

Annette Ellams-Trogan

FOREWORD

This is a book for those who think seriously about great music, especially for those who long to truly understand the constitution of the musical work and its relevance to humanity. Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche et al., asked fervent questions about music. Schopenhauer even attempted to formulate a comprehensive philosophy, claiming music to be a replication of his famous concept of the Will. Schopenhauer, however, was not a musician. The present author, Roland Trogan, takes him to task for his ignorance of the art and his naïveté.

In fact, throughout history, philosophers have failed to explain the aesthetic issues of music in ways that genuinely enlighten. This has largely been the case because each speaks and writes in his national language. But music is a completely different kind of language, running parallel to and apart from any human language, and this language—the music language—none of the great philosophers spoke, except on the most rudimentary level. It seems almost impertinent of them to attempt to resolve music’s aesthetic mysteries when they knew the music tongue only on the level of a small child. Surely composers best understand what to look for in musical issues.

Interestingly, Schumann and Weber were regarded by some contemporaries as better writers than composers. Wagner, Liszt, Saint-Saens, Rimsky-Korsakov, Smetana, and Stravinsky are among many composers known for their literary contributions as well as for their musical genius. Mussorgsky thought of music as a means of communication, not as an end in itself. Then there is Mendelssohn who when asked what some of his Songs Without Words meant responded that words would "not suffice for such a purpose and if I found they did suffice I would not have anything more to do with music… There is so much talk about music and yet so little is said."¹ Indeed, multitudes have offered thoughts on the nature of music: philosophers from all times; academics from various disciplines; all types of musicians and musicologists; those who became iconic; and people who simply, passionately, loved the art. But, as with Hollywood movie stars who are pleasant to hear and to behold, we must also ask if they have anything worth saying.

Here, in fact, is a book that actually says things of much importance, from a man particularly qualified to say them. Dr. Trogan has arrived at a framework for music’s historical development within the changing Western culture. He offers new theories. He asks questions that should have been asked long ago but were not, and he provides their answers, which are brilliant, remarkably original, and unprecedented. Roland Trogan’s creativity, musicianship, training, and experience make him a person we must listen to, carefully.

A musical prodigy, Trogan began performing classical piano music, weekly, for two years, on live radio from Saginaw, Michigan (where he was born), before beginning formal training in composition at the University of Michigan, where he later received his doctorate in music composition. He studied there with Ross Lee Finney and Leslie Bassett. Trogan’s compositional work during this time was recognized by awards from BMI and the Louisville Symphony, which performed his Two Scenes for Orchestra in 1955.

Trogan held graduate fellowships in music and in English. It was Professor Kenneth Thorpe Rowe who chose Trogan as his teaching assistant without ever meeting or interviewing him. Rowe hired Trogan solely based on the quality of critical thought Trogan had exhibited in a series of papers on contemporary drama. Rowe was also the teacher of Arthur Miller when the playwright attended University of Michigan. Rowe was a formative influence on several other important playwrights. Rowe’s expertise was an important factor in the development of Trogan’s aesthetic thinking, enriched from many hours of private conversation. About that time (1954), Trogan was engaged as associate conductor and composer-in-residence by the Saginaw Civic Symphony, under the Russian conductor Josef Cherniavsky. Trogan came to Cherniavsky’s attention after he learned of Trogan’s new prize-winning one-act opera, The Hat Man, which was widely performed.

In 1960, Trogan began private studies in music composition with the great composer Roger Sessions at Princeton; this experience was the most profound influence in Trogan’s life, both musically and personally. In New York, he single-handedly organized public concerts, lectures, and seminars featuring the most prominent personages and ensembles: composers Henry Cowell and Wallingford Riegger; the Kohon String Quartet (winner of the Grand Prix du Disque,); violinist Max Polikoff (founder of the famous Music in Our Time concert series at the YMHA in Manhattan); and the great violist Walter Trampler. After completing his doctoral thesis, the "Concerto for Violin and Orchestra," in 1963, Trogan took up residence on Staten Island, New York. This marked the real beginning of his public musical career. His works were performed in all of New York City’s important venues including Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall; recordings of his music were funded by the Ford Foundation and were widely broadcast; interviews were frequent on TV and international radio; premieres of his piano music were given by Paul Jacobs; Trogan’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin was performed by Harold Kohon in Town Hall; and Richard Woitach, the Metropolitan Opera conductor, performed a recital at Lincoln Center, consisting entirely of Trogan’s piano music. Trogan also taught for several years at the University of the City of New York and privately for a large number of prominent individuals and families in the fields of music, diplomacy, theater, and finance, including the families of violinist Isaac Stern and actor Richard Burton; the American ambassador to France, Felix Rohatyn; Mr. Shamas, the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United Nations; and Victor DeRenzi, Director of the Sarasota Opera Company.

When the great violinist Isaac Stern was deciding whether Trogan might be the music teacher of his daughter, Stern put Trogan through an oral music exam lasting two hours—in the company of Mrs. Stern and Stern’s accompanist, Alexander Zakin, as well as that pianist’s wife. Stern permitted none of the others to say a word to Trogan. The great violinist began the inquisition asking about the composer’s ideas on teaching music. Then the interrogation shifted to music in general and twentieth-century music in particular. Very soon, the dialogue lost its formal tone, and Stern entered into an absorbing conversation. The two men freely and enthusiastically spoke to each other regarding their musical insights. When the encounter was over, the great violinist came up to Trogan, shook his hand, and whispered quietly to him, You and I understand each other, but most people would have no idea what we are talking about.

Correspondence followed this endearing encounter, and Stern asked to see Trogan’s Violin Concerto. That work was being examined by Isaac Stern at the time of his death, and the manuscript is still somewhere in the papers of Mr. Stern’s estate. Much of what the violinist told Roland Trogan became foundational in the composer’s thought. Isaac Stern was a major influence on the author of this book.

Trogan’s compositions of this period, The Seafarer Cantata, Five Nocturnes for Piano, and the First Piano Sonata, established his uniquely personal and passionate stylistic voice. This music marked a climax in Trogan’s compositional career as well as the beginning of a hiatus in his composing, a long interregnum provoked by his profound disappointment in the megalomaniacal antics of many prominent and publicly respected musicians who engaged in endless pursuits of fame, influence, and money—this being in contradistinction to Trogan’s enduring respect for Isaac Stern, whom Trogan has always considered a paragon of artistic integrity and musical genius.

During his period of compositional abstinence, Trogan turned his attention to founding a highly successful music school on Staten Island in 1975, which he continued to direct until his death in 2012. During this time, he was awarded two grants from the Academy of Arts and Letters, which helped launch his second compositional period in 1997, beginning with the creation of much piano music as well as his Chamber Symphony and the Mas Ficciones for solo violin, based on a haunting story by Jorge Luis Borges. In 2004, Trogan founded Patrice Editions, LLC, a company devoted to recording and publishing fine contemporary music and literature. It was at that time that Trogan began collecting his notes for The Circle and the Diamond—The Odyssey of Music.

In The Circle and the Diamond, Roland Trogan explicates philosopher Suzanne Langer’s notion that music consists of patterns of sentience. He enlarges the parameters of what musicians call harmonic rhythm to include many other features, such as texture and sectionalism. Changes in the rates of the oscillation of these elements correspond to existential and phenomenological patterns of human experience, ranging from mental and emotional states to biorhythms and the course of life itself. The author also disperses our musical past to three temporal aesthetics—Circular, Chronological, and Infinite—that lay behind all historical styles, in order to explain how music changes in response to new worldviews. An abundance of interesting observations flows forward in this book, which also includes controversial chapters such as The Dark Age and Inspiration. The chapter called Silence says things about that phenomenon that have never been said before and brings to this matter the clearest and most direct language, providing the first sensible, comprehensible explanation of the role of musical silence in the history of aesthetic inquiry. But perhaps the most startling idea in The Circle and the Diamond is a completely new paradigm for understanding recent music. Trogan’s theory of diamond music (also called Music of Infinity) posits that in the hands of diamond composers, the very perception of passing time is altered. This new,