Conference Agenda

In this presentation, I want to think with Ornette Coleman about the importance of the rehearsal for musical thought in process. Coleman’s musical philosophy of harmolodics has been the subject of much speculation. Rather than theorise his practice in terms of a unified theory or an elaboration of discreet musical or philosophical concepts, it might be worth thinking of it as a methodology of rehearsal.

One problem with any attempt of theorising rehearsals as a historical and theoretical place of musicking lies in the precarity of the archive. In Coleman’s case, I can listen to rehearsal tapes, recorded interviews, live and studio recordings or conduct interviews with band members. But there is little written musical material that evidences how concepts or ideas are put into practice. In rehearsal, authorship becomes constellated. The theorist here cannot rely on formalised explications and instead needs to learn to rehearse with the materials afforded by the archive: such as anecdotes, photographs, scrappy bootlegs as well as networks of musical materials and players. Theorising here takes the form of rehearsing itself.

My own theoretical encounter with the archives of Coleman’s musical poetics asks: Can a rehearsal be an archive of musical theorising? And if so, how to make sense of it (from a distance)? How do you rehearse with an archive? How does theory rehearse with a musical practice? And what is the role of the theorist in all of this?

Between 1922 and 1940, composer and folklorist Emilis Melngailis was traveling the countryside of newly-independent Latvia, transcribing the songs of his informants. Young and old, rural and urban, unhoused and politically powerful, the details of his singers’ identities were written in his notebooks alongside the tautas dziesmas (traditional Latvian songs) that he transcribed (currently accessible through the Digital Archives of Latvian Folklore). These transcriptions were numbered, totaling well over four thousand, and organized in staved volumes according to the region in which they were sung. In addition to all of this information – names, birthplaces, ages, melodies, lyrics – Melngailis also found room on his pages to jot down notes to himself. In these unassuming notes, Melngailis exposes how a single melody functions within a longstanding aural tradition like that of the Latvian tautas dziesmas.

Aside from notes referencing his excitement when he heard “harmonizations!” (in a singing tradition often generalized as monophonic), and those clarifying his notations of microtimings and microtones, Melngailis’ marginalia is often self-referential, highlighting when one transcribed melody is a “variant” of another or “sung as” an earlier entry. Not only an astute ethnographer and classically trained composer, Melngailis was also well-versed in tautas dziesmas and their practice. As such, while scholarly debates were preoccupied with the age of each individual tautas dziesma (see: Jurjāns, 1894; Švābe, 1923; Straubergs, 1952), Melngailis highlighted a question that is perhaps more vital to the practice of the Latvian song culture: how can practitioners (including this author) consider vastly different melodies all the “same” song? Through surveying the entries that Melngailis noted as “sung alike” to one another, this paper will explore how Melngailis begins to build a theorization of how similarity sounds, even if only in his margins.

To feel the order of this rhythm is to feel the order of the universe.”

So argued Hilla von Rebay (1890-1967), an artist, curator, and the founding director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the institution that later became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. For Rebay, rhythmic balance in non-objective painting was not just an aesthetic concern but an expression of a deeper cosmic order—an invisible force governing the universe. She characterized non-objective artists such as Vasily Kandinsky and Rudolf Bauer as prophetic visionaries, receptive to this hidden rhythm and capable of rendering it visible to the “outer eye.” Rebay taught that exposure to the rhythmic power of their paintings subconsciously attuned viewers’ vision to cosmic law. This attunement, she insisted, was not merely for individual growth but essential for human advancement. She even claimed that non-objective painting “will unite nations more firmly than any league of nations.”

Rebay’s concept of “cosmic rhythm” in non-objective painting is an important example of how speculative music theory profoundly shaped abstract art in the early 20th century. This lightning talk will introduce Rebay’s public lectures, exhibition catalog essays, and key non-objective paintings, emphasizing their value to the history of music theory. If taken seriously in this way, they reveal a vibrant world of musical speculation that has largely remained outside the field of music studies.

In the process, this presentation will also highlight some methodological challenges of working at this intersection of music theory and art theory. These include the relatively new state of scholarship about Theosophy and esoteric spiritual movements, the main sources that informed Rebay’s understanding of cosmic music; the erasure of women in historical avant-garde narratives; and disciplinary expectations that privilege sound-based practices, which can sideline painting as a critical site for understanding how music shaped modernism.