Rosen insisted that to understand music in particular, and art and literature in general, one must take a historicist viewpoint, as well as engaging with it on many levels simultaneously.
The democratising and destructive nature of 12-tone music, whereby the selected tone row is both liberating and tyrannical, and its relationship to architecture, literature, and the visual arts, has long fascinated me. And, conceptually speaking, the Gesamtkunstwerk that is the Christian cathedral and its sonorous rites.
One could imagine a Piranesi of the page constructing sonnets like carceri to shore against their ruins – and ours.
A fugue on both our houses to know we inhabit these different worlds counterpointed, in contrasting modes. Yours, warmth and colour and light and enchantment; mine, icy winds and ruins rising from a winter’s loam whose cadences are minor.