Here's the latest installment of a series I am doing on music and poetry. The idea is to construct sets of analogies about the practice of music and the practice of poetry, both writing and listening, composing and reading. As of now, my plan for unleahing them on the world is to have one side of the analogy read and recorded as a sound file to be played while the opposite side of the analogy is displayed (either in a flash web animation platform, or as a kind of video piece). Sorry if its a little dense/boring:

In music we speak of horizontal and vertical dimensions. The horizontal is what is sonorant to every listener- it is the succession of sounds in time (notice that the listener is not necessarily compelled to believe that this succession is a complex of many sounds- it could simply be one “music”).

The vertical dimension is slightly trickier, though no less real. Each moment of music is analyzable as a complex of multiple tones, related to each other in the logic of any of several theoretic systems (serialist, Shenkerian, blues cadence, etc.). More elementally, each tone itself contains many other tones, as its overtones, who vibrate by virtue of the physics of standing waves, which in nature are never pure (i.e., never contain fewer than two frequencies). Of course, in music many of these overtones may also occur as actual tones in toned by their own instrument, simultaneously with this tone, which in the orientation in which we are now speaking, is called the “fundamental tone”. This fundamental may, in another orientation, be an overtone of some other fundamental. Thus the vertical dimension of music is a set of tones arranged mathematically around one tone.

In poetry we speak of vertical and horizontal dimensions. The horizontal dimension is what is apparent to every reader- it is the arrangement of words in space (notice that the listener is not necessarily compelled to believe that this arrangement supervenes on some culturally-agreed-upon strategy for ordering words as we read- i.e. left to right- top to bottom; top to bottom- left to right; right to left- top to bottom, etc.). The horizontal dimension encompasses every possible relation of words in a two-dimensional space, or as imagined in possible successions of time(s).

The vertical dimension is more conventional, though no less obscure. Each word is analyzable as a complex of a definition and an etymology. In the definition, there is the word’s extension, or the reality to which it vertically ostends, and its intention, or the internal realities which it seeks to both express and affect. In its etymology, there is the various other words to which it is related, as species of genus are related- where both extend from a common ancestor whose trace may be found severally. Of course, all of these components, both the intention and even the extension, as well as the etymology, must necessarily be expressed in more word. Thus the vertical dimension of a word is a set of other possible words, arranged semantically around the word in question.

An analogy between these two uses of “vertical” and “horizontal”, respectively, is wanting.