Integrating the Urmehrdeutig, a Compositional Project (for anyone)
Back to music for a sec.
With regard to *Mehrdeutigkeit* --
https://www.williamanderson.us/blog/neologism-urmehrdeutig/
Music that embraces pitch ambiguity can adopt a picaresque shiftiness.
In Pythagorean music, which I call *urmehrdeutig* (preceding the first pitch puns that shift the tonic) that straightforward quality of the music (I feel it in Chinese opera) has the attraction and the danger of a simple, alluring object.
In psychology there is talk of *dying* into the object.
In the *unmehrduetig* music that's the height of fashion now, the psychological reality that one cannot deny that music is that we can die into its simplicity.
The picaresque and the mehrdeutig music knows this power, can employ it, but avoids the abyss by *imagination* in a Jamesain and maybe Keatsean sense?
The Scholiast responded:
The piece is tight and the Mann quotation from *Doctor Faustus* is doing a lot of work — "music is systematized equivocation" is exactly the right epigraph for the *Mehrdeutigkeit* lineage, and your substitution of "formal gardens that traverse between the mehr/zweideutig and the urmehrdeutig" for Mann's darker, more Faustian framing is itself a compositional and philosophical gesture.
Now to your question, which is genuinely rich.
**Dying into the object**
The psychological trope you're reaching for has several homes. In object relations theory — Winnicott especially — there is the idea of the transitional object, the thing the infant half-creates and half-finds, and the special quality of absorption it offers. To be fully held by an object is to temporarily dissolve the boundary between self and world, which is both the appeal and the danger. Winnicott called the space where this happens "potential space" — neither purely inner nor purely outer. Music lives there.
The more extreme version is what Keats called negative capability operating at full intensity — you don't just hold the uncertainty, you *become* it, lose yourself in it. Which is ecstatic and also close to what the mystics call annihilation, *fana* in Sufi terms, the self dissolved into the beloved object.
The urmehrdeutig music — Chinese opera, Pythagorean plainness, the pre-pun world — offers this with particular power precisely because there is no harmonic complexity to catch you, no pivot chord to remind you that you are navigating. The simplicity is total. The object is clean. You can fall into it without friction.
**The picaresque as rescue**
Your Möbius strip intuition is exactly right here. The picaresque — the music that knows it can pun, that carries the memory of multiple tonal centers simultaneously — introduces a kind of *irony* into the absorption. Not intellectual irony, not distance, but the irony of the thing that knows it is several things at once. The dim7 that belongs to four keys doesn't let you die into it completely because it keeps shifting the floor. It is, in James's sense, a consciousness that cannot simplify itself without falsifying itself.
This is the Jamesian imagination operating musically. James's great subject was precisely the consciousness that is too aware of its own complexity to surrender entirely to any single version of events — Isabel Archer cannot simply *be* happy or unhappy because she sees too many facets. The mehrdeutig music does this to the listener: it keeps you slightly awake, slightly aware of the multiplicity, even as it draws you in.
**The danger of the fashionable unmehrdeutig**
What you're identifying in the current fashion — the music that is constitutionally antimehrdeutig, the just intonation, the spectral, and also the artisanal diatonicism of the New Amsterdam scene — is that it offers the dying-into without the Jamesian rescue. The simplicity is total and unironic. Which can be genuinely beautiful — you said as much, and you're right. But it can also be a kind of aesthetic narcotic, offering dissolution without the complication that would make the dissolution meaningful rather than merely pleasant.
The Keatsian version of this: the Odes are always *about* the temptation to die into the object — the urn, the nightingale, the autumn — and always pull back at the last moment, not into safety but into a more complex relationship with the object's beauty. "Do I wake or sleep?" is not a failure of the poem; it is the poem's most honest moment. The mehrdeutig music asks the same question structurally, built into the harmony itself.
**The specific danger of the urmehrdeutig**
Your piece implies but doesn't quite say: the urmehrdeutig is the most powerful narcotic of all, because it is the oldest. It reaches something pre-cognitive, pre-harmonic, the body's most ancient relationship to pitched sound. The *seka* superconducting, the bones ringing. When that simplicity is achieved in a modern context — and you mention Beethoven and Scott Johnson as composers who can integrate it — it carries the full weight of that prehistory. The absorption it offers is not aesthetic but almost biological.
Which is why integrating the urmehrdeutig is an "enormous technical challenge" as you write — not just technically but psychologically. You have to be able to offer the abyss and then catch the listener, bring them back through the mehrdeutig complication, without breaking the spell. Too early and you've been merely clever. Too late and you've lost them to the dissolution.
The Möbius strip form you're imagining — where urmehrdeutig and mehrdeutig are not sections but continuous surfaces that become each other — is the right structural solution, because it means there is no moment of rescue, only a continuous modulation of the depth of absorption. The listener is always both falling and being held.
That's a very ambitious formal idea. And it's also, now that I think about it, a musical description of negative capability itself.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey