Janus in Wonderland: pitch class spelling and identity in Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland

Abstract

‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’, and why is a G♯ like an A♭? The harmony in Unsuk Chin’s 2008 opera Alice in Wonderland is organised around a whole-tonal hexachord usually spelled C, D, E, F♯, G♯, B♭—but not always. There are moments at which these pitch classes change their names, switching to their sharp or flat equivalents. Rejecting the tonal-functional implications of the term 'enharmonicism', this paper seek a new framework for discussing these post-tonal moments of shifting pitch-class identity. By invoking the image of Janus, the two-faced Roman god of transition, this paper describes a pitch class that is able to turn both a flat and a sharp ‘face’ from the same point. It foregrounds that pitch’s capacity not just to be a fixed part of a set, but sometimes a liminal space between sets, or apart from them altogether.

Bringing the janiform identities of pitches to bear on operatic interpretation, this paper employs the existential-phenomenological model of identity advocated by R. D. Laing in The Divided Self to investigate the interstices between the ontological insecurities of pitches and people alike. Released to an audience increasingly concerned with identity politics, Chin’s opera about a girl who repeatedly asks ‘who am I?’ provides a compelling vantage point from which to examine questions of identity, both in the engraved score and in the psyche.

This was my final-year undergraduate analysis project. It has too many diagrams to fit on this blog, but you can find a .pdf file here.