November 21, 2004
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Today’s Sermon:
Canonization
The title of Cleanth Brooks’s classic The Well Wrought Urn comes from a poem by John Donne:
We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes;
As well a well wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes.“A poem cannot exhaust reality, but it can arrest it: by manifesting
a vision of experience available in no other way. This is only possible
because, like a physical urn, it is a distinct substantial object: only
by its difference from human experience can a poem represent that experience,
even as the urn can be a metaphor for a poem only if it is not itself a
poem. The alternative to ‘crystalline closure’ is not, then,
an endless and chaotic ‘repetition and proliferation,’ but a
structured relationship of significance.”– The Old New Criticism and Its Critics, by R. V. Young, Professor of English at
North Carolina State UniversityRelated reading: At War with the Word, by R. V. Young.
“A musical composition in which the voices begin one after another, at
regular intervals, successively taking up the same subject. It either
winds up with a coda (tailpiece), or, as each voice finishes, commences
anew, thus forming a perpetual fugue or round.” — Webster’s Revised Unabridged DictionaryCanonization:
The process of making a musical theme into a canon:
“The phrase continues almost uninterrupted and unvaried until the canonization of the theme….”
– Program Notes for
Greater Dallas Youth Orchestras,
Sunday May 18, 2003, by Erin Lin
on Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 78,
by Camille Saint-SaënsFor more on this concept, see the Log24.net entries of July 16-31, 2004, and in particular the entries of July 25.
See, too, Theme and Variations, with its midi of Bach’s
Fourteen Canons on the First Eight Notes of the Goldberg Ground.
