Chaos, Self-Similarity, Musical Phrase and Form

The idea of chaos is aesthetically strangely satisfying. Chaos represents the antithesis of artistic production, but it also marks the edge of an abyss along which art often wanders, letting the fumes from below cast a lightly corrosive coat over the order the artist has worked so hard to create. Art can overcome, and may even to a certain degree thrive on, chaos in the physical, everyday world, but real chaos, chaos of the mind and soul, is horribly destructive. Marina Tsvetayeva, Sylvia Plath, Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Paul Celan are but a few of those in our century whose art was born at that edge between order and chaos but whom the chaos finally overwhelmed. The art born on this dangerous abyss has an authenticity which seems to condemn to banality that arising in safer regions. Much of the important art, poetry and music of our century comes from this border where chaos, in the elemental, existential sense of the word, meets the will to order. We all carry echoes of primal chaos in us; these echoes allow us to understand the wonder of art which creates safe havens (for that is the function of structure) from the chaos which is always threatening to impinge upon us. I shall not write further here about this sense of chaos in music or other art, but I set thes