[not] -- contrast
[not] -- contrast
One person talking over another produces nothing but chaos. Trying to interpret two speech streams at once is impossible.
Opera composers learned to circumvent this problem with music. Interlocking conversations between two or more people can be sustained with the aid of rhythm and melody.
But long before opera, Catholic and Orthodox liturgies developed a better tool — counterpointing speech with music. It is common for the beginning of a spoken prayer to dovetail with the end of a chant or for a prayer to be spoken at the same time that a hymn is a sung. The contrast between the musical phrases and the spoken phrases make both much easier to comprehend.
As obvious as this sounds, it is rare to find spoken speech counterpointed with sung speech anywhere outside of a religious setting. The Libera Me from Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles is one of the few examples in the classical repertoire —
In the beginning, the earth was without form because God had not separated darkness from light or water from land. Structure implies contrast. Negation is the fundamental operation underpinning all logic and art.