Within the discourse on the arts, architecture holds a special place as the most musical of art forms. Critics observed that architectural metaphors such as space, structure and proportion are ubiquitous in music discourse, noting the arts forms’ shared capacity for shaping one’s experience of time. This study identifies a strategy for expressing relationships between musical works and physical structures used in two recent compositions that invite listeners to experience physical spaces through the mediation of musical agents. Both works – Caroline Shaw’s Plan and Elevation (2015) and Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (1971) – take as their subject matter physical spaces endowed with aesthetic as well as spiritual qualities. In this intertextual analysis I propose that Plan and Elevation and Rothko Chapel can be richly experienced by listeners as dramatic narratives shaped by virtual subjectivity, formed contextually in each work by its persisting presence, which is expressed in consistent thematic, timbral and textural features that identify and differentiate it from its musical landscape. Moreover, examining virtual agency in each work reveals a narrative of transcendence, as each subject’s identity gradually transforms towards abstraction, reproducing a metaphor for the spiritual process one may experience in the physical space.
