THE MUSICAL DEPICTION OF A DISTORTED PLACE, SPACE AND TIME: AN INTERPRETATION OF JOHN ZORN'SINTERZONE

Abstract

This article interprets John Zorn's composition Interzone (2010) by comparing it to the eponymous place that is found throughout William S. Burroughs’ early novels. This is done through linking some of the ‘sound blocks’ that make up Zorn's composition to selected passages from Burroughs’ books as well as to specific events from the lives of Interzone's two dedicatees: Burroughs, and his associate, the writer and painter Brion Gysin. Zorn's disjointed, chaotic arrangement of sound blocks, and by extension their extra-musical associations, is then shown to emulate the dream-like structure of the phantasmatic place that is Interzone, which Burroughs created for his novels with the aid of Gysin's ‘cut-up’ method. Through these extra-musical connotations, it is demonstrated that Zorn's composition imitates Interzone's distortion of place; of internal and external space; and, most importantly, of time.