Music of Contingency: A Musical Topic of Cosmic Horror in Depictions of “The Music of Erich Zann”

Abstract

H.P. Lovecraft was a twentieth-century American writer whose short story “The Music of Erich Zann” has inspired musical works in several genres. This story was written within Lovecraft’s aesthetic of cosmic horror, an aesthetic which portrays the disintegration of a subject following exposure to the unknown terrors of reality. While cosmic horror shares some characteristics with Immanuel Kant’s and Edmund Burke’s sublime, it differs in that it denies the objective distance and foundation of reason required by Kant and Burke to allow the subject to gain pleasure from the experience. Considering two musical responses to “The Music of Erich Zann” by composers Raymond Wilding-White and Alexey Voytenko, this paper finds a similar distinction between musical expressions of the sublime and cosmic horror. Both compositions use some techniques from the musical topics of ombra and tempesta that scholar Clive McClelland describes as musical emanations of the sublime; however, both also present techniques beyond these topics that deny the listener a foundation in familiarity and any single musical frame. As a result, this paper argues that these compositions exemplify a musical topic of cosmic horror that is similar to but distinct from the topics of musical sublimity. This ‘music of contingency,’ titled in reference to philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s work, emerged to express the new anxieties and pluralities of the twentieth century.