Maurice Windleburn. John Zorn’s File Card Works: Hypertextual Intermediality in Composition and Analysis

The prodigious quantity and diversity of John Zorn’s compositional output can be bewildering and uneven, presenting difficulties that even Zorn himself acknowledges. His music encompasses, on the one hand, a sense of bringing ‘transcendence’ to musicians and audiences, as the singer Barbara Hannigan has said, while it might also feel ‘shocking, like a deep scar on the face of the bourgeois society’, in the words of producer Stefan Winter. Beyond the wildly varied sound-surface, however, identifiable continuities of thought and practice underpin Zorn’s work throughout his career. One of these is his frequent use of sets of file cards (or index cards) to develop the preparatory material for a musical work.