canons. And only a fool would conclude from this that disorder is a necessary or sufficient cause of new artistic value. Patricia Carpenter, The musical object* I (Music as object and music as process) It is my concern here to focus attention on the quite ordinary notion of "a piece" of music. Usually when we speak of music today, we make (per- haps implicitly) what seems to me an interesting distinction between "music" and "a piece" of that music. It is this distinction and some ofits consequences which I shall explore. In the narrow sense, I shall take "a piece" to represent a particular way of conceiving musical form, which has been characteristic in the mainstream of the modern Western tradition. This might be compared, perhaps, to the way a painting in this tradition has been conceived as a piece of three- dimensional visual space, articulated upon a plane by clear relations between objects and calculated to be seen from a single point of view, i.e., in the manner of classical perspective. I think the chronological limits for this con- ception of form in the two modes of perception roughly coincide-from about 1420-30 to about 1910.1 I raise the problem of "a piece" in this sense for two reasons: whereas the kind of form to which this notion gives rise has seemed eminently natural to the mode of vision, it is difficult to see how it can be constructed for and grasped by the ear. What kind of a piece can be made out of so incorporeal a stuff as music? Secondly, many of the current controversies over musical form are rooted, I believe, in the assumption of this particular kind of form as an ideal, a norm that has been identified, in music as in other arts, with High Art. The self-conscious notion of the musical work and the cultivation of autonomous musical form both arose in connection with an early culmina- tion of this formal ideal during the 16th century. Today this model of form is called into question. Current controversies concerning musical form reflect in a specialized way the change in conception of 'form' in general. But form is an aspect of object. And such controversies are complicated by a more deep-seated change in the conception of 'object' itself. They are interesting because they bring to light tensions between old and new ways of conceiving, and hence, of perceiving, the world. Consider two examples which reflect two very different conceptions of the nature of music. One is a piece, in the narrow sense in which I have taken this notion; one is not. Ionization, by Edgard Varese, is an exploration of a new kind of musical '" A revised version ofa paper presented at a joint meeting of the Greater New York and Princeton chapters of the American Musicological Society at Princeton, January 7, 1967. 56 canons. And only a fool would conclude from this that disorder is a necessary or sufficient cause of new artistic value. Patricia Carpenter, The musical object* I (Music as object and music as process) It is my concern here to focus attention on the quite ordinary notion of "a piece" of music. Usually when we speak of music today, we make (per- haps implicitly) what seems to me an interesting distinction between "music" and "a piece" of that music. It is this distinction and some ofits consequences which I shall explore. In the narrow sense, I shall take "a piece" to represent a particular way of conceiving musical form, which has been characteristic in the mainstream of the modern Western tradition. This might be compared, perhaps, to the way a painting in this tradition has been conceived as a piece of three- dimensional visual space, articulated upon a plane by clear relations between objects and calculated to be seen from a single point of view, i.e., in the manner of classical perspective. I think the chronological limits for this con- ception of form in the two modes of perception roughly coincide-from about 1420-30 to about 1910.1 I raise the problem of "a piece" in this sense for two reasons: whereas the kind of form to which this notion gives rise has seemed eminently natural to the mode of vision, it is difficult to see how it can be constructed for and grasped by the ear. What kind of a piece can be made out of so incorporeal a stuff as music? Secondly, many of the current controversies over musical form are rooted, I believe, in the assumption of this particular kind of form as an ideal, a norm that has been identified, in music as in other arts, with High Art. The self-conscious notion of the musical work and the cultivation of autonomous musical form both arose in connection with an early culmina- tion of this formal ideal during the 16th century. Today this model of form is called into question. Current controversies concerning musical form reflect in a specialized way the change in conception of 'form' in general. But form is an aspect of object. And such controversies are complicated by a more deep-seated change in the conception of 'object' itself. They are interesting because they bring to light tensions between old and new ways of conceiving, and hence, of perceiving, the world. Consider two examples which reflect two very different conceptions of the nature of music. One is a piece, in the narrow sense in which I have taken this notion; one is not. Ionization, by Edgard Varese, is an exploration of a new kind of musical '" A revised version ofa paper presented at a joint meeting of the Greater New York and Princeton chapters of the American Musicological Society at Princeton, January 7, 1967. 56 matter. He considered music to be not so much the organization of tone as of all sound. Nevertheless, however revolutionary its stuff, this piece presents me with a familiar model of form: I grasp its shape much as I do the first movement of a symphony by Mozart, as a single unified gesture or motion- an introduction, first and second ideas, climax and release, coda. Or, in the terms by which Aristotle characterized the movement or plot of a tragedy, I follow a beginning, middle, and end. By way of contrast, music such as John Cage's Variationsfor Orchestra and Dance cannot be comprehended in this way. Cage is also interested in expanding the stuff of music. "If this word 'music"', he says, "is sacred and reserved for 18th- and 19th-century instru- ments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound." But his set of variations, however familiar its title, is not, in fact, "a piece" (except perhaps in the sense that a Chinese painting, by serving as a sort of window, cuts out "a piece" of the endlessly extended visual world). In his notes for the performance of the Variations, Cage writes: "In recent years my musical ideas have continued to move away from object (a composition having a well-defined relationship of parts) into process (nonstructured activities, indeterminate in character)." To approach such pieces as objects, he says, is to miss the point utterly. They are, rather, "occasions for ex- perience" . Although these two examples are eccentric, they illustrate very well two different-and I take them as polar-ways in which music can be said to be: as object and as process. A piece of music is, first of all, music conceived as an object. Any form is an entity; a piece of music is musical form highly stylized toward wholeness. The most obvious differences between these two examples involve those aspects of a work which we ordinarily class as "form"- features of the overall structure of the whole. The two examples illustrate differences between an articulated and a diffuse structure. Whereas the Cage is a random flow of musical happenings, the Varese is tightly organized. It has clear relations of part to part and of parts to whole; its parts are highly articulated within the whole. Music thus conceived as object invites us by its clear overall structure to step back and look at its "objective" aspect, i.e., its form. The difference in the degree to which these two examples are in fact ob- jects entails another difference-a difference in the distance from which we experience the music. In order to hear Varese's piece, I do indeed "step back", as it were, and its familiar formal structure helps me to place it as something I recognize, over there. Cage, on the contrary, seems to draw me into the musical process, as if he were concerned to break down the distance between the music and the listening subject, to obliterate the "otherness" of the musical object. There is a fundamental difference between music in which one stands at the center and music to which one is "spectator". In a sense, Cage reverses a procedure which seems to have been self-consciously carried out during the early developmentJof the autonomous musical work, that of placing it there, 57 at a distance. The deliberate exploitation of physical space in music, as in Venice and Rome at the outset of the Baroque era, has the effect of specifically locating a piece of music in relation to the external world. The achievement of this fundamental requirement for objectivity (i.e., distance) can be seen, for example, in that exemplar of the autonomous piece, the fugue. I suggest that one of the primary differences between the so-called precursors of fugue (a ricercar of Adriano Willaert, for instance) and the fugue as it cul- minates in the works of Sebastian Bach is the distance from which we listen. The ricercar was written primarily for performance; the listener, as per- former, participates to produce the whole from within the piece. The scale by which he ·listens is quite small; he follows best near-reaching relations of "texture". The piece is most satisfactorily grasped at the level of moment-to- moment unfolding of an activity. But the performer of the fugue presents a musical object intended for contemplation by someone who is removed and listening, someone who grasps more far-reaching relations of structure in his confrontation of the piece as a whole. As in the examples of Cage and Varese, structural differences between the pieces of Willaert and Bach illustrate, respectively, differences between a diffuse and articulated kind of construction. But there are further corre- sponding differences concerning distance. In respect of the functional relation within the musical situation between hearing subject and object heard, the music of Cage and Willaert might be said to be syncretic, as compared to that ofVarese and Bach, in the extent to which the relation between subject and object is fused. In regarding a musical object, we can consider not only the mode of its construction and the manner in which it asks to be heard, but also other aspects of the heard thing-for example, ways in which it is related to space and time. For instance, the factor of distance dictates a difference in the space that music shapes and fills. Although the increasing hierarchization of the musical space by means of tonality is an important feature of the develop- ment from ricercar to fugue, the two contemporary examples, which use not tone but sound, still present two very different kinds of musical space. Varese speaks of the spatiality of sound and molds it as if it were a very solid, palpable matter. Cage, on the contrary, exploits the most fundamental prop- erties of the mode of hearing. He deliberately breaks down any sense of corporality or external spatiality and constructs-or better, induces-what has been described as an "acoustic" space. Time, consequently, is made manifest in two very different ways. Varese shapes a single stretch of time which is outlined, framed, and conceived as one motion. Not so Cage, for whom there is no causality, no necessity-with respect to the sounds them- selves, which are randomly produced, or with respect to their order, brought about by the improvisatory movements of dancers and sound engineers. Time is something that simply happens. Hence, there is no unity of content, no musical idea that is stated, developed, and summarized, as in the Varese. Cage is not constructing the kind of musical discourse which has served as 58 r a model for familiar form from, say, the fugue of Bach, to the present day. ! Early in the era, Johann Gottfried Walther aptly described what has happened to in the Western world: the word 'musica', he says in his definition, has gone through a change in its usage from adjective to sub- stantive (Musicalisches Lexicon oder Musicalische Bibliothec, Leipzig, 1732). A piece of music, in the narrow sense of musical form highly stylized toward objectivity, has been achieved by an application of wholeness on increasingly far-reaching levels, an increasing unification of the musical object in respect of both form and content. Composer and listener alike have learned, over greater spans of time, to keep a musical form present as a whole and cogent as a whole. In the broadest sense, a piece of music is something like what the philoso- pher, Edmund HusserI, had in mind when he used music as a demonstration of our subjective consciousness of time. The first note of a piece of music, he says, is not over until the last has ceased to sound. 2 At the least, that is to say, the idea of a piece of music carries the requirement of some kind of wholeness. Indeed, it is a remarkable representation of wholeness, not only in the per- ception of music but also in the realm of perception in general. The basic fact about a piece of music is that the object heard is never actually there; yet actually, in our mode' of hearing music strikingly tends toward wholeness, toward Gestalt. For this reason, the kind of hearing demanded by modern Western music has been called "antilogical perception", for it requires the ability to grasp the nonsimultaneous as simultaneous.3 The apprehension of a melody demonstrates a paradox of simultaneity in successiveness. A melody, like a swing of my hand, for example, can be understood as made up of a series of instants or moments-in the case of the gesture, an infinite number of motionless hand stages; in the case of the melody, moments articulated, per- haps, by tones-each moment to the right of, or later than, the last. Yet the melody, like the gesture, is as a single motion. Now problems posed by the melody-or by the physical motion-are in miniature the most fundamental problems presented by the notion of a piece of music. These are problems concerning our apprehension of time itself, problems concerning continuity in change and a piece of time grasped as an entity. These problems are not new to the contemporary world. Zeno's ancient paradox of the arrow, for instance, presents the problem of continuity of motion. Augustine, concerned with time as perceived in the course of a poem, wrestles with the problem of a moment-a time-point now which has no extension. Aristoxenus of Tarentum placed the problem within the realm of music: we hear music simultaneously both as it is occurring and as it has occurred. Music owes its effect, he said, to the fact that in it there is not only a pure temporal becoming but also a spatial being. In the West, it would seem, it is these stable elements of "spatial being" which we have increasingly emphasized, until today a melody has become the paradigm for perceptual 59 form in general. The paradoxical nature of a melody focused, at the beginning of this century, a revision of old notions of perception away from the model of an entity as a bundle of sensations and associations, toward the recognition of the primacy in our perception of wholeness-of qualities and of structures belonging only to wholes. In contemporary theory of form, a melody is a model for a perceived object, a Gestalt, and for an object of a rather curious kind-a so-called "temporal object". A melody is an object in the sense of pure form (it can be moved from place to place within the pitch-space, and yet remain constantly itself) ; and it is an entity which is grasped as a whole (it is more than its successive parts); but it also includes temporal extension in its very nature (it is a shaped course of time). A melody is the simplest sort of a piece of music.4 But the very notion of a piece, applied to music, is somewhat paradoxical, for a "piece" is a loose or separated part or fragment-a portion of something, as it were, taken from or added to a concrete whole. If we piece something together, we make an aggregate, not a true whole. Yet a piece of art, of literature, of music may be taken to be an organism in the sense that to re- move anyone ofits members is to deform it. Therefore, I shall take the position that the notion of a piece of music is not really so ordinary an idea, but, on the contrary, rather extraordinary, emerging quite locally in the Western tradition and developing in a spec- tacular fashion during the past two centuries. There are musics which are primarily sheer process-unfixed expression, motor participation, magical incantation-but these are musics less differentiated than ours. In the West, music is microcosm, discourse, architectonic construction. A piece of music is finished work, opus perfectum et absolutum, a product brought to completion and detached, as it were, from the loom. Most music of the world is not primarily perceptual form, i.e., something to be listened to; our music is. In our central Western tradition, music has been gradually but steadily pried loose from its surrounding world of activity. And it is this process of differentiation that I want to investigate here. Briefly, the gradual emergence of the piece of music might be described in two stages, as the transformation of music from process to product (resfacta, a made thing) and from product to poem (in the modern sense of the word, a created thing). The self-conscious notion of the piece of music arises late, as compared to that of the poem, say, or drama. The new idea emerges in the humanistic climate of the 16th century and shows itself specifically in a new concern for the musical work. The phrase opus perfectum et absolutum, for in- stance, first appears in a textbook written by Nikolaus Listenius 5 in the 1530's in connection with the reformation of the schools in Germany; But the em- phasis on the musical work was only a symptom of a striking change in attitude toward the nature and function of music itself. There is a cluster of new notions around this idea: for example, a new attention to the notated, published composition, which now stands independent both of practice and 60 of its maker; a new role taken by the maker, who is now not only builder but also creator; concern for a new kind of expressivity in music; and a new significance given to the act of musical creation itself as a bringing-forth rather than a letting-be. The background for the work of art in music, as in the other arts, is the transformation of skill to expression, of know-how to genius, of ars to Art-i.e., the change in the conception of creation from sacred to secular. () ! I am not concerned here with tracing the historical background of a piece of music except insofar as it illuminates the problems of form peculiar to this kind of music, problems of a thoroughly composed work, fixed with respect to substance and fixed with respect to form. Nevertheless, I do want to question our very conception of "a piece". The contraction of our contemporary world affords us insight into the extent to which different people and different cultures (and historians must add, different eras) differently conceive, struc- ture, and constitute their worlds. For the sake of exploration, then, consider briefly some of the peculiarities of our Western habits of thought, for example, the kind of thinking that leads to the notion of "a piece". II (Object as entity) 'Piece' is an interesting sort of a noun. It has been maintained that the language (like the music) of a people reflects their reality. And nouns like 'piece' are not found in all languages. Indeed, such nouns are strikingly characteristic of the group of languages sometimes called Standard Average European. Let me spend a few moments on what kind of an object such a noun denotes, for such objects presumably are not found in all worlds. Our Western way of speaking shows a striking tendency to objectify and spatialize things. A comparison made by Benjamin Lee Whorf of differences in structure embedded in the language of the Hopi Indians and Standard Average European brings to light very different fundamental conceptions of the world-especially of matter, space, and time-which point up our Western inclination toward objectification.7 We objectify many things which Whorf calls "imaginary" entities. For example, we objectify multiplicities. We use plurals not only for actual aggregates that can be given all at once (such as ten men) but also for "imaginary" aggregates (such as ten days). The Hopi does not use plurals in the latter case but would say, rather, "until the eleventh day" or "after the tenth day". In a similar way, we objectify phases of cycles. We treat nouns like 'summer', 'morning', 'hour' in much the same way as other nouns; we can say "at sunset", like "at the corner" or "in the orchard". In Hopi, phase terms are not nouns, but a kind of adverb, rather like "when it is morning" or "while morning-phase is occurring". This tendency to spatialize time is reflected in our language in other ways, as for instance, in our three- tense system of verbal forms, by which we are able to stand time units in a row, so to speak, in our imagination; and also in our widespread use of spatial metaphors in speaking of durations, intensities, and tendencies. (We use such 61 words as 'long', 'short', 'heavy', 'light', 'high', 'low', 'rise, 'fall'.) The Hopi never speaks of space unless the space involved is actually there. But he has, on the other hand, a huge class of words denoting only intensities and strengths, how they vary, their rate of change, and so forth-ways of describing process and events so subtle and abstract that it is often difficult for us to follow him. We objectify even timeitsel£ We speak of a time, a moment of time, a second, a year of time, like a bottle of milk or a piece of cheese. In Hopi, nothing is suggested about time except the perpetual "getting later" of it. But "a piece" of time is merely an instance of yet another peculiarity of our language: our nouns of physical quantity. Whorf distinguishes two sorts of nouns in our way of speaking: individual nouns denoting discrete bodies with definite outlines (such as a tree, a stick, a man) and mass nouns (such as 'water', 'flour', 'wood', 'granite'). Mass nouns denote homogeneous continua without implied boundaries. Where it is desirable to indicate boundaries for a mass noun, we do so by such phrases as 'a pane of glass', 'a cup of coffee', 'a piece of soap', i.e., by a combination of a term for container or body-type with one for contents or matter. Hopi nouns, by contrast, always have an individual sense, even though the boundaries of some objects are vague or indefinite. Our manner of speaking paves the way, Whorf thinks, for our notion of the world as a combination of form and substance (a notion, incidentally, which much of 20th-century thought has been engaged in refuting). In our Western way of speaking, we seem to assume a reality fundamentally made up of objects that persist and are recognizable through time. Our sentences can speak of subjects taking an action or of subjects to which qualities are attrib- uted, but in both cases the subject is made of some sort of substance that endures. Even when the subject is not an object in this sense-for example, an event-we speak of it as if it were. Thus, as one commentator puts it, a mechanic will talk of fixing the timing on a car in much the same terms that he uses in speaking of fixing the tire, even though the timing is simply a re- lation of events, whereas the tire is a thing. Perhaps this is simply a meta- phorical manner of speaking, but the metaphor proceeds via the conception of a stable physical object. A piece of music is like the timing on a car; it has been objectified. Now there are many kinds of objects-material, immaterial, real, unreal, things, thoughts, events, states of mind. But however an object is constituted, there are three minimal for its objectness. An object is, first of all, an other, not I; I grasp it as a part of that world which I encounter as there, not here. Also it is an entity: anything to be perceived at all must be perceived as a whole or a part of a whole, as something, for perception is fundamentally an act of integration. And finally, because perception also involves an act of categorization, an object is a certain kind of a thing: I grasp it as some kind of an identity which persists as a recognizable part of my world. 62 In a specific sense, we have been accustomed to distinguish object from pro- cess or event. Several sensations received simultaneously represent our idea of an object; received successively, of an event. Now this is not, in fact, so simple a distinction to make, because "simultaneity" is not a simple notion. Nevertheless, a piece of music is, of course, an event. Its connections are laid out in time; they come to pass and die away. But it is not sheer pro- cess, sheer succession; it is an event, a succession. Like discourse, a piece of music takes time to disclose its meaning; yet it can be comprehended in a single act of the imagination. Like a melody, a piece can be made to be a single image, which I grasp not only as a successive, but also as a simul- taneous, whole. Such a piece is exemplified by the Prelude in B minor, No. 24, from Bach's Well-tempered Clavier, Book 1. What I hear first is an instrumental sound- a piece of keyboard music. And it sounds "baroque": I am immediately Ex. 1 J. S. Bach, WTC I, Prelude 24. struck by a familiar kind of continuity, the sense of "ongoingness" given by the walking bass. I am listening to a performance for harpsichord, so the single sounds are discrete and non legato, "atomistic". Yet the materials I hear are lines-two lines-although there is, in fact, no melody in the com- mon sense of a singable line. In the left hand I hear a scale passage, part of the habitual vocabulary of any continuo player, a keyboard cliche; and in the right hand, a contrapuntal cliche, a duo of fourth-species suspension figures. But as a whole the piece is shaped like a melody. It moves like a melody-strongly anchored between points of tension and rest, exploiting the possibilities for pattern inherent in the musical system it manifests. I follow and grasp a single, continuous motion. The two lines never stop at the same time except at the half-cadence, which marks "antecedent" and "con- sequent" phrases. The momentum builds up relentlessly, through the knotted-up climax of sequences to its release at the final cadence. In its over- all structure the entire piece is a "melody" -shape, even though it is made out of an "instrumental" kind of stuff-a two-strand line polarized into right- and left-hand material. At this most primitive level of form-i.e., of sheer sound quality-I grasp first this particular kind of texture. At ground, it is this texture which Bach has manipulated and I recognize this Prelude first as a certain kind of a musical object, made out of this kind of sound. Consider the musical object. Musical hearing deals with what has been called a "pure" sensation, disembodied from its sounding source, which 63 \ functions more like thought than like a thing. Nonetheless, a piece of music is something grasped, something encountered outside myself. There is a space between it and me: it is something that can somehow be laid hold of. And there is a relation between it and me: I bear on it and it also bears on me. A piece of music has an identity of its own. It is something fixed and embodied, which exists in its own right, past the death of its maker. It is a made thing- res facta, to use the 15th-century term which distinguished it from improv- isation-notated and preserved like any poem or drama and meant to be heard and reheard. It is available for contemplation and analysis. As I learn to know it, I know it as a thing, quite apart from any single experience of it. I can "walk around it", so to speak, and am very much aware of its "other side". And if I know it well, I certainly know what it "looks like" as a whole, as if from a single point of view. Yet like any object, a piece of music is in- exhaustible. My perception of it is never limited to a single aspect-for example, to one moment of creation or one unrepeatable performance. A piece of music is not sheer act of music-making, but a musical "thing", with its own depth, solidity, and volume. It is "raumlich"-and I borrow the sense of the word from Paul Klee-in that it is related to physical, intellectual, and imaginative concepts of space as well as of time. And finally, a piece of music corresponds to something I recognize. Just as I cannot see a chair, a man, the letter A, without some sort of schema into which it fits, so also I cannot hear a piece of music that is not part of my world. In this regard, the importance of the great formal types of musical organization developed in our tradition cannot be discounted, for they serve as perceptual categories. They establish certain recognizable musical events which aid thus in the comprehension of a total form. If, for example, a "literate" listener should come in in the middle of a sonata, he knows where he is, where within the whole he is located. In some degree this can be said as well ofa fugue after Bach. This kind of wholeness is one of structure. But there is another kind of wholeness by which we recognize a sonata- sound or fugue-sound from the first few notes, just as we recognize a piece for keyboard, a baroque piece, a piece by Bach. We recognize a specific kind of an entity immediately and intuitively, for what it is. This, I should say, is the most primitive level of wholeness-on the level of sheer sound. Rather than a structure which is comprehended as a whole, this is a total, global quality, i.e., a quality of substance that pervades the whole. These two extremes of wholeness-a pervading quality of the whole or a well-articulated structure- delimit a continuum along which many kinds of musical wholes may lie. The problems, then, of fashioning a piece of music have to do with whole- ness and are twofold: those of any temporal Gestalt, and those of a sheerly musical nature. The first are problems of connecting, grouping, and binding together a shape given only gradually in time. To make "an event", I must first of all give it an outline, so that it is finished, framed, somehow set apart; so that 64 it has a shape and is indeed "a piece" within the course of time. This is the problem of temporal art in general: the integration of successive stimuli. But stricdy speaking, a piece of music is not just any happening or ex- perience. It is isolated as to modality of perception; it is a part ofa differen- tiated perceptual field, in this case, the auditory field; it is something to be listened to. If then, a piece of music is a piece of time, as is sometimes said, it is heard time, objectified time, not my own, subjective, lived time. The specific problems of making and grasping a piece of music do ulti- mately lie in the stuff itself and have to do not so much with differences be- tween a statically given structure and dynamic, unfolding process, as with the peculiar nature of musical objectivity, with difficulties that arise in trying to fix music and give it body. For the notion of a "piece", as we have seen, is modeled after the notion of a thing. But sound is notoriously evanescent, fragile, and intangible. The musical object is indeed there, something en- countered, but it is easily internalized, difficult to keep at a distance and in self-repose. A piece of music presupposes, even before the attempt to create a shape in time, a step back, away from the stuff, so that its substance is clearly distinguished from my own mood, phantasy, feeling, activity. The ultimate problem of the musical work of art lies toward the negative side of autonomy, toward distance and isolation. It is not so much to free music from words, representation, or function, as to free it from ourselves, to externalize it. The musical object must not only be made whole, but also given body, located at a distance and kept there. It must be "spatialized", so to speak. The problem of musical form conceived as a piece is the making of the musical thing. III (The object as distanced) When we speak of music as "a piece", then, we assume for it a particular mode of existence: it is an object, and an object of a certain kind. We assume that some kind of a form has been imposed upon an indefinitely extending sub- stance, that is, upon music. Such a form, at a· highly developed level, might represent a familiar formal type, such as a fugue or a sonata. But at the least, such a form is a limit, a boundary, an outline-some kind of a container, like a frame. For example, the early centuries of our history of music show pro- gressive achievements in the fixing of sound, but they might be seen as well as steps in isolating and framing a piece of sound. Now to conceive of reality in terms of form and substance, I have em- phasized, is to construe it in the model of a thing, a stable physical object, which we step away from and view from without. This dichotomy is especially uncomfortable in regard to music, chiefly because its substance seems so intangible and so immediate. Precisely for this reason, I suggest, the dichot- omy of form and substance has been important in music as it has come to exist in our Western world-as work of art. True, an essential feature of the art work is the inseparability of form and substance. Nevertheless, the condition for Art is the articulation of form through a specific medium. And further, artistic form is not the result of 3+ C•M• 65 % internal forces that shape the thing, but, by definition, a form imposed uponi! the substance from without by its maker, whose mark the object bears. Thus,i! although the work of art does not exist in the world of things but in a realm!! of its own, the first step toward the art work is the step back, which distances:\ i The notion of the work of art, in the sense of an object created for itself, is quite unique to our modern Western world, developing chiefly during the 18th century. It was Immanuel Kant, at the end of that century, who emphasized the requirement of distance for the work of art, that it must exist in another, the aesthetic, realm, isolated from the demands of both doing and knowing. The technical means by which the art object has been set apart in a spiritual space of its own, in the modern world, are collected under the idea of Beauty. Such an object is made to be clearly an image, not real: framing subdues the context of reality, idealizing the content removes it; from reality, and concentration and intensification lift it out of the real world.s Music by its very nature seems extraordinarily "distanced" in this regard; its ties to reality seem remote. But any particular piece may be more or less framed, isolated, idealized, concentrated, intensified. Bach's B minor Prelude, for example, is probably not a work of art in our modern sense; it was written for teaching purposes. Nevertheless, it illustrates certain means for achieving distance analogous to those which have been applied in literature or painting. It is a single, serious action, shaped as one intensely directed motion, clearly defined as to beginning, middle, and end, and unified as to content. The whole is an expansion of a single musical idea stated in the first measure-which is a remarkable sort of a "beginning": a precisely'sym- metrical division of the octave of the key, by scalar tetrachords in the left hand and fourths in the right-a motion left closed and without a leading- tone, stable, yet strongly impelled forward by the suspension formulae. This idea is thoroughly worked out in the middle and brought to resolution and summary in a perfectly placed climax. Now this kind of a shape is self-consciously modeled after a conception of "good" rhetorical or dramatic form and has prevailed during the time, in our tradition, when music has been conceived as a kind of language-i.e., from about 1680 to about 1880. A piece of music became, according to this model, expressive discourse, a poem. But in a more general sense, our entire tradition of music in the West has been engaged in setting apart the musical object, in stabilizing the musical process into product. The means by which a physical object has been thus distanced, in order to exist for its own sake, is that which our culture has traditionally applied to the object of thought, i.e., theoria, contemplation. This is an ancient image: if life is compared to a fair, for example, in which some strive, while some are spec- tators, it is the philosopher who is contemplator and, in this fundamental sense, theorist. Objectivity in our music, too, has been achieved by heighten- 66 ing the traditional distinction between doing and knowing and, thereby, between the knower and the known. To a child, for instance, or to a man who lives in a world more primitive than ours, music is primarily activity, something to do. In such a world, reality is organized in a syncretic manner; i.e., ideas, feelings, actions, objects are undifferentiated in a functional sense. The interaction between subject and world is more fused, more immediate. Experience is a sort of continuum, in which time and space exist in a more or less undifferentiated manner: space is a structure embedded in concrete activity, a space-of-action; time is a moment, a salient event in the concrete flow of action. Things are perceived differently than in our world: they do not stand out there, discrete and fixed in meaning with respect to the knowing subject. Things in that world are intrinsically part of the whole situation, which is itself essentially dynamic. Objects are things-of-action, signal-things-i.e., known and recognized by their functional and pragmatic character. A thing is, first of all, what you can do with it. A stick, for example, may be something to hit with, something to reach for something with, something to be held like a doll, or ridden like a horse. In such a world, music, too, is embedded in the immediate, concrete, dynamic situation, deeply bound up with the activity of life. A free sound or a fragment of tune may be something to play with; a hypnotic chant or beat may be something to be used-to activate a magic connection between inner and outer, for instance, or to help sustain an effort. But primarily music is something to be responded to. To the infant, sound is one of the most primi- tive stimuli for the "startle" response. One of his strongest impulses is to kick in response to sound; and a motor response of the whole body cannot ordi- narily be inhibited until adolescence. An interesting point has been made in this regard: that being musical is nothing else than being master of one's own transport the influence of tones. 9 The Western tradition, however, in even its earliest images of music, has shown an inclination to distance it-to rationalize, and hence to objectify, it. The West has placed music on the side of the mind-towards logos, knowl- edge, education, communication, expression. Western music calls on memory, retention, expectation. For us, music is primarily something to be learned, taught, achieved, accomplished, created. In the mainstream of our culture, the various conceptions of music reflect a progressive transformation of the nature of music from activity to object. In Antiquity, mousike qualified a certain kind of activity, a certain know-how, a skilled" way of making. The broad sphere of the Muses originally embraced a part of the arts of produc- tion, of poesis: those of the arts which produce not things, but images. As our tradition increasingly separated the acts of making and doing from that of knowing, music, too, was conceived as knowledge (in the broader sense of scientia) as opposed to its practice. But in our modern world music is no longer primarily either a certain kind of activity or a kind of knowledge, but a work of art. The piece of music, in this context, arose between the two 67 realms of theory and practice-in the area of poetica, now reinterpreted as the production of real, not ideal, things. The modern world is concerned with the concrete, perceived musical form-with the actual realization before our eyes, so to speak, of a heard movement in space and time,here and now. In our contemporary way of thinking, a piece of music is a specific kind of an object, a made thing, a stylistically made thing, and ultimately, an object made for its own sake, a form of being-in-itself. On this view, "music", then, becomes the total collection of all its pieces, the imaginary museum of musical works. Now I have sketched a picture of the gradual differentiation in our musical culture of a musical object in order to bring to bear on it principles of a more general nature having to do with perception. For that process of differ- entiation presents a rather remarkable resemblance, it seems to me, to the ' development in the growing child of a consciousness of an objective world, i.e., of his gradual reorganization, reconstruction, and transformation of experience itself. One might say that we have reconstructed the musical experience, learning to make and to grasp a musical object in something like the way the child learns to distance and comprehend the world around him. It is fruitful to look at the emergence of the musical object by analogy to genetic development-i.e., as an increasing differentiation of parts of the organism, on the one hand, and as an increasing hierarchization and subor- dination of the parts to the whole, on the other-because the analogy illumi- nates in a broad way perceptual problems that this particular kind of form presents in music. A piece of music, in this sense of music that has been highly stylized toward objectivity, exploits to a remarkable degree the principles of so-called "good" Gestalt, e.g., centering, regularity, smooth continuation, and the like.1o But as I have pointed out, a well-articulated structure is only one pole of' wholeness in music. Characteristics of a more primitive kind of form are described by Heinz Werner in a study of some of the fundamental changes that come about through a primitivation of a given pattern.ll Children of , kindergarten age who were asked to reproduce a given pattern (either auditory or visual) showed a striking tendency toward leveling and closure, which results in two sorts of diffuse, nonhierarchical form: they produced, on the one hand, a radically homogeneous, global type of representation, with strong emphasis on qualities-of-the-whole (for example, figures made more uniform and indivisible, open figures closed, parts made alike and symmetri- cal, directions simplified) and on the other, a chain type of structure, character- ized by a relative lack of definiteness in the relation of the parts (occasioned by the fact that these parts are experienced as multiple global units and not conceived as figurally related and strictly centralized). Kurt Koffka sum- marized the diffuse way in which the child shapes his world: because his categories are so highly dynamic, he can integrate into one sphere of being and happening th,ings which have nothing in common except that they are 68 continuous in space and time. Children use juxtaposition, whereas adults use integration. Although syncretism, he says, means a firm cohesion of parts, the parts articulate very poorly with one another.12 Two criteria are helpful in a study of the musical object, as they have been in genetic psychology in regard to objects in general-the polar concepts of syncretic as opposed to discrete and of diffuse as opposed to articulated.13 These concepts served as a framework for the earlier comparison of a highly articulated, distanced work by Varese and a musical process, diffusely put together by Cage. The first polarity describes a functional development in the relation of sub- ject and object from a high degree of fusion to separation of ego and world- or, in regard to the musical work, from intense participation of the subject to extreme isolation of the musical object. This raises the question of the so- called "optimum distance" at which an art object should be contemplated in order best to be seen; for each such object dictates its own distance (the single point of view demanded by classical perspective is an exaggerated case of this). Further, to view the musical whole from a distance entails a pro- gressive unification of the over-all field, or space. The second polarity describes a development in structure from the diffuse kind of composition described above by Werner and Koffka to one in which the parts are well articulated and subordinated to the whole. Exemplars in perceptual theory are often drawn from music: a glissando exemplifies a diffuse structure; a melody, an articulated one. But music presents us with many illustrations of these two polar kinds of form-for example, the highly structured, goal-directed kind of motion so effectively achieved by classic triadic tonality as contrasted to a mosaic sort of form put together by juxtaposition, as shown by canzonas ofthe early 17th century, many of the works of Debussy or Stravinsky, or contemporary experiments in musical collage. Both of these polarities, of function and of structure, bear on the level in time at which a piece of music is organized as a whole. IV (Hearing) A piece of music is not only an object grasped, a perceptual form; it is an object heard, grasped in a specific way. At ground, the problems of musical form conceived primarily as something to be listened to are the problems of auditory perception. Before turning to the characteristics of a specifically heard thing, then, let me turn your attention to hearing itself and the quite remarkable place it occupies in the total sensorium, especially in view of the premium put today on the highly differentiated and specific sense of vision. It has been maintained that a primitive syncretic state, in which sensorial, motor, emotional, and conceptual phenomena are inseparably fused, is the ground of experience for all of us. Only gradually do we distinguish in our experience between motor and sensory response, between an internal sensory 69 and external mode of behaviour, and, indeed, among the senses themselves. For all of us, hearing remains close to that primitive global state. The sensorium is progressively differentiated in two directions: toward in- creasing discreteness or clarity of distinction between internal and external world (tasting and smelling are said to be more primitive because of their inability to distinguish subjective and objective content) and toward in- creasing articulation in modes of perception (a visual act is less syncretic than. hearing, tasting, or smelling, because it is characterized by a higher degree of . specificity). Hearing in many ways remains close to an undifferentiated response of the total organism in both these directions. For instance, hearing is close to the intersensory relationship known as "synaesthesia" (i.e., the arousal by a specific stimulus of a second sensation united with the first), the most common form being a coupling of color and tone perception. The following example of a total synaesthesia is the response of a under the effects of mescalin to a steady knocking on the wall: "I think that I hear noises and see faces, and yet everything is one and the same. I cannot tell whether I am seeing or hearing. I feel, taste, and smell the sound. It's all one. I, myself, am the sound." This kind of total response to sound, it has been shown, is prevalent among primitive and archaic peoples and, it is suggested, is potentially inherent in the mentality of all OfUS.14 Similarly, the interrelation between hearing and motor response is especial- ly strong. Plato remarked on the fact that the young of all creatures cannot be quiet in their bodies or in their voices (arguing that therefore education is to be given first through music). And it has been pointed out that the imagi- nation for motion, i.e., the ability to transform kinetic energy into kinetic imagery, is acquired only late in life. For such reasons as these, perhaps, one view of music has traditionally placed it on the subjective side of our world-as the representation of our inner life, pure will, for example; or as an image of "pure duration", pure subjectivity. The tune, says Bergson, cradles us and pulls us back to the psychic state from which it comes.15 But the interesting fact about hearing, and especially musical hearing, it seems to me, is the peculiar way in which it mediates between inner and outer world. This is expressed in one of the oldest images of music, as harmonia, the perfect attunement between microcosm and macrocosm. And it is this-the peculiar relation between subject and object within the activity, the situation of music-that is an issue today. The double nature of hearing with respect to the subjective and objective world has been emphasized by Helmut Reinold. If the senses are arranged in a hierarchy that reaches from the more object-related to the more subject- related sensory perceptions (at one end of the scale, the existence and con- dition of material objects; at the other, the fact that we feel this way or that), and if the acoustic mode is placed within this hierarchy, then the quite special and significant position of auditory perceptions, he says, becomes evident. Beyond their capacity of not being experienced as affects of a bodily 70 JiMQ part (as are taste and temperature experiences), auditory perceptions can become separated from their object, move to the forefront of experience, stand and hold attention by themselves, as, for instance, in music. 16 The ambivalent nature of hearing is already seen in the earliest responses of the infant to sound. He has two very different responses. In general, his reactions to sounds are very diffuse, involving practically the whole body, a mass reaction described as "flight". But one of his earliest specific responses is, in fact, to sound: he turns his head in order to locate and fix in place a sound as an external object. Different stages in the hierarchical position of sound relative to the internal and external world-what might be called a scale in the degree ofimmediacy by which we experience sound-have been demonstrated by Heinz Werner, who differentiates three levels in the experience of tone: instrumental tone, spatial tone, and what he calls "vital sensation". Let me summarize some of this work, my point being that in order to create a musical object, it is necessary to transform sound from vital sensation into tone that has an ob- jective character. If a series of tones is played on a piano, several stages of awareness can be shown to exist, which differ as to degree of subjectivity in the hearing of the tone". Commonly it is perceived as altogether outside the listener, as coming from a specifically defined source of sound and bound up with some particular object (for example, a musical instrument). Such a tone may be called an "instrumental tone". There is as well another type of tonal experience, in which the tone no longer seems to reside primarily in the object or instru- ment, but rather fills the space around it, occupying the entire room. This may be called a "spatial tone". Both of these possess an objective character. Yet there is still another way of experiencing tone, i.e., as actually vibrating within the hearer. (" I am filled with tone, as if I were a bell that had been struck.") It is tone experienced in this manner that Werner calls vital sensa- tion. Vital sensations are devoid of the objectivity that characterizes the instrument or spatial tone; they are psychophysically undifferentiated and involve pervasive bodily reactions to the stimuli,17 A piece of music, as distinguished from sheer musical process or activity, articulates not only a piece; a stretch, of time, but also shapes and fills a kind of tonal space of its own. Now I have suggested that the peculiar relation between listening subject and the world he hears-a connection of interpenetration and immediacy- has become a crucial issue in our contemporary world. I have maintained that the musical object, in the mainstream of our modern Western tradition, has been fashioned after the manner of a thing visually perceived. Our dominant conception of reality, as evident to the sense of sight, is, I believe, in a process of change. And the nature of this change is strikingly demon- strated, I think, in our music. One of the more interesting ideas currently being explored is that our 71 present view of reality, in which real things, persons, ideas, and events are spread out there, clearly and distinctly before us in a more or less continuous, uniform line, is essentially visual; that this view arose at the turn to the Renaissance, out of the "auditory-tactile" matrix of a less fragmented, more total (perhaps less civilized) earlier sort of a world, through the isolation of one thing at a time, one operation at a time, one sense at a time; and that this predominantly visual approach to the world is again giving way to a more global way of conceiving of the real. I have tried to show here that hearing in its essential nature negates this kind of a visual world. Yet the heard object, the piece of music, has become in this visual world the paradigm, not only for perceptual form, but also for artistic form. "All art", writes Walter Pater at the end of the last century, "constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it."18 Pater conceives of music as "pure" language. But in this passage can be heard the ancient strain of music conceived as sounding number, pure form. And it echoes as well another version of this old notion, one which prevailed during the time about which Pater writes-the Renaissance. The model for beauty and wholeness, as described by Leon Battista Alberti, for instance, in the mid-15th century, was the harmonious proportion of an ideal body, so ordered that every part has its fixed size and shape and that nothing can be added or taken away without destroying the harmony of the whole. Music also served as paradigm for this conception of form. But this is form eminently separable from the matter it shapes-it is number, "organic geometry", abstract and priorly given, ideally existing beyond real time or space. Yet the image is concrete and corporeal. An "ideal" body was achieved by seeking after "the most fugitive aspects of things" and by putting together only the most perfect parts found in nature. But the harmonies generated were con- cretely seen (in the porportions of buildings, for example) and concretely heard. And the eye and ear were in agreement. Alberti borrowed his rules for harmonic relations from musicians ("to whom this sort of numbers is ex- tremely well known") for an interesting reason: "The numbers by means of which the agreement of sounds affects our ears with delight are the very same which please our eyes and our minds."19 His statement might be taken as terminus a quo in the career of a piece of music, for it indicates a turning point at which real space, indeed, was "musicalized"-but where real music, in turn, was spatialized. V (The heard thing) I have spent some time on the matter of isolating and externalizing a musical object and setting it at a the problem, that is, of making it discrete in an objective world. Let me turn now to the matter of distinguish- ing it as a specifically heard thing, an object made out of sound. This will con- 72 cern the problems of giving such an object body and keeping it present. What are the differences in objects, as they are seen, heard, felt? Hearing has been defined as acoustic successiveness.' And, on this basis, a distinction has been drawn between an object given simultaneously in space and one given "only" in time. A painting, it is said, presents itself to me all at once as a meaningful whole, so that I am able to grasp it in a single mo- ment or to contemplate it at my leisure. But like any object that unfolds in time, a piece of music is never simultaneously there. It comes to me only one sound at a time; one moment after another passes the time-point now. The musical object thus is discontinuous, fragmentary, and scarcely lays claim to existence at all. On this view, painting has been taken to exemplify being, and music, the process ofbecoming.2o Now I do not want to raise here the venerable issue of the uirity or division of the arts, but I do want to point out that such a one-sided view of hearing is misleading in its emphasis and gives rise, therefore, to several problems. The first concerns what a piece of music is made of. Music as physical thing might, perhaps, be said to be made up of sound (and the absence of sound). But what we perceive as object, in both time and space, is not a bundle of sensa- tions, given either successively or simultaneously, but an organization of stimuli. And, at the level of aesthetic object, an element in a piece of music is already formed material. Such an object is not made up of instants or of single tones, but of concretely sounding forms in motion. Another question concerns succession or, broadly, our perception of time. In experience the present is not an unextended point of time-"now". On the contrary, we hold, in the present, a bit of time, "just as you can hold in your hand a certain amount of water from a flowing stream", as it has been put.21 Although that amount of time varies, its upper limit is ordinarily about 5 or 6 seconds. How, in music, do we connect a succession of such "nows"? A third question concerns simultaneity or, broadly, our perception of space. It is not the case that, in time, we hear one thing at a time. The sense that comes closest to dealing with one thing at a time is the sense of touch. A conception of space in which things are spread out one at a time in a line is the conception of tactile space. We hear many things at once--one time, it is true, at a time. There are important differences between vision and hearing other than simultaneity versus successiveness. For example, vision separates, holds things apart in space, even as it holds them together in a space, simultane- ously. But the things we hear are fused; we hear them all at once. And, as I have emphasized, vision distances, whereas hearing interconnects. I cannot explore these questions adequately here, yet perhaps it is pro- vocative to raise them. But I shall attempt to deal with them briefly by build- ing up a picture of the musical object. Let me begin at the most primitive level in an approach to the musical object, i.e., with a state of consciousness. Consciousness, it seems, is of a dual 73 nature: it is both temporal and presentational. I am aware at a primary level: of both the flow of time and the presentation of structures within that ': stream of time-i.e., experience always presents us with objects in contexts, !: not with bare sense-data. I cannot begin to build an object, then, from a pure:: sensation, such as "sound". The first operation of attention is to create for; itself a field. Consider first, then, structures within that field-within the temporal flow of consciousness. That is, consider simultaneity. My field of awareness includes everything that is given as co-present, in various degrees of simultaneity and various degrees of vagueness: a problem with which I am concerned, shadows of possible solutions or consequences, a sense of my environment and of myself. If I am neither looking nor listening, for example, then either visual or auditory continuum is a sort of diffuse background-the sound of the ocean, the light of day. To grasp anything, distinctly, to articulate thai total field, I must categorize: first, by a mode of, intending-this is something perceived, perhaps, or something imagined;' then (since I am interested here in the perceptual field), by a mode of per-, ception-this is something seen or something heard. Yet there are differences even at this level of awareness in the modalities of perception. For example, perhaps there are street noises outside, hums and creaks inside, a child sing- ing in the next room-these may still be background sound, part of the audi- tory field. Like the visual field, the auditory field is unbounded and continu- ous. But it is peculiarly immediate. Even without my active attention sounds easily penetrate; the ear is passive. Yet without my active participation they do not readily remain; sound is evanescent and fragile. Now suppose I actively attend to the sounds around me; I shut my eyes and listen. Then the vague, indefinite stuff of sound becomes an auditory ii world. As soon as I fix my attention, I fix "things" as well. Sounding objects .' emerge and isolate themselves as sounding things which are presented to my mind as things happening: a rustle, i.e., something rustling-a thump, i.e., something falling. Things are perceived differently in different modalities. If I feel a cube, for instance, I proceed in a line, grasping each surface as I go, collecting the information in my mind as I proceed. If I see a cube, what I see-i.e., three of its sides-is unclear, but the knowledge I have of simple i cubeness fills out my perception and renders it clear. If I hear something, I immediately and clearly know a great deal about it: an approaching heavy truck; several children over there, at play. Space perception, the visual perception of objects, separates things. It has to do with outlines, distinctions, articulation. My eye can follow a multi- plicity of lines, extending in many different directions. At the same time, the background of visual space acts as a container, holding together a myriad of objects, all at once. The primary fact about visual space is that it is empty. Perception of sound, by contrast, fuses things. The first observable fact about auditory space is that it is full. It is full of everything that is sounding now. I can easily hear two, three, a hundred sounds, but they tend to fuse 74 ¥£:;UQ 3, ,_ L into one event. Nevertheless, I collect a great deal of particular information about the external world through my ears. I can locate objects-quite accurately with respect to direction, less so with respect to distance. Sounds give me little information about the size and shape of a source, but can tell me much about its personality. And acuity for thresholds of perception of events in time (the difference between the instantaneous and the durable, for instance, and between simultaneity and succession) is a hundredfold sharper for hearing-and touch-than for vision. Space, then, whether auditory or visual or tactile, I take to be the form of the world in the sense of its objectivity, its givenness. And auditory space is the sum total of my perception, through my ears, of the external world. Musical space is a piece of auditory space. Suppose now I turn my attention to the child's singing, with the intent to listen. What happens now as the background song becomes foreground? If the child simply reiterates the same figure over and over, this is not yet temporal construction. Nevertheless, the music itself stands out against the background noises of the sounding world, which are now masked, as if part of a surrounding silence. There is a difference now between the silence of'the background (which is probably not true silence) and the gaps of silence that articulate the music (these are indeed true silences and belong to its own continuity). The music is perceptually isolated; it has an outline; it makes and fills its own tonal space; it is a piece of music. If the child is singing what we grasp as a melody, that melody comes forth as a nonspatial figure. It arises across the single tones and traces its outline upon a tonal space, against a background of silence. I am aware of what happens during the course of the melody, of its beginning, of points within it in relation to the beginning, of its completion. A melody in our modern sense is more than mere prolongation of musical matter, mere reiteration; it is a temporal object. And it is as well a musical object; it marks out, concretizes, fixes, embodies, enlivens a piece of musical space. I have developed the notion of a piece of music as a piece of the concretely sounding musical field. Let me illustrate this idea by returning to the primary phenomenon in the articulation of any perceptual field, i.e., the differentia- tion between figure and ground. Auditory space has been described as a sphere without fixed boundaries, as a space made by the thing itself, not a space containing the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in flux. It has no fixed bound- aries and no point of favored focus. Whereas the eye pinpoints, locating each object in physical space against a background, the ear favors sound from any direction and is indifferent to background.22 Now this is not entirely accurate, for the depth of the world is given to the ear, as it is to the eye. A sound-figure can move in a heard line against a background which is much like the flight of a bird, for example, seen against 75 the sky. Sound, like sight, lays out planes of depth. The farthest seems at first to be made up of distant sounds, such as the recurring roll of the sea, but this is because distance blurs detail. In fact, ifwe listen to the space around us, we notice that continuous, homogeneous, undifferentiated sounds tend chiefly to make up the background: traffic sounds outside, a ticking watch nearby, the, hum of my typewriter. It is the shaped sounds-characteristic, isolated, dis- cretely outlined-that stand out from the background as figure. This is a phenomenon we, as musicians, know well, for in music back- \, ground and foreground are not usually constituted by actual distance, but by , formal features. When we speak of different "textures", we are usually speaking of differing relations of figure and ground. Sixteenth-century polyphony, for example, tends toward 'an undifferentiated field. The beauty of the Renaissance line lies in the manner in which it contributes to the whole organism. To remove one line is like taking one thread from a tapestry or one member from a body. The separate strands are generally neutral, typical, idealized parts. The Renaissance musical space is not a container for a motion or a figure; figure is minimized and the line is leveled to a smooth part. The' musical space becomes solid and homogeneous. To some extent this relation of part to whole holds for the Bach B minor Prelude; each line is equally central in our attention. But each is highly characteristic in nature; each now has the quality of "figure". Much of the I movement in the piece comes about as one or the other of the lines comes for- ward as foreground, a shift in focus which is produced by the slightest shift in pattern. And we are strikingly aware of the tendency of a continuous motion to become background (as in the bass) when it is relieved for a mo- ment at the half-cadence. Ex. 2 Frederic Chopin, Three Etudes (posthumous), No.2 In a texture which is clearly what we call "homophony", however, it is exactly this relation between figure and ground that the composer manipu- lates. Compare to the Bach, for instance, a piece by Chopin-the "Mos- cheles" Etude in A-flat Major. This is also essentially a single melodic line, which is reflected in its triadic support and rhythmically distorted in a subtle manner. The melody itself is, in fact, so simple that it recedes into the back- ground and is absorbed into the total stream of sound, which is shaped (harmonically and rhythmically) by the standing-forth of one figural distortion after another. In the "Funeral Scene" in Wagner's Gotterdammerung, the 76 tSCZQ ¥ akU: £_ framework is also a simple melody, consisting of five quite regular phrases, marked by a half-cadence to the tonic major and framed by material which sets the scene. Here, too, the melody and its "scenic" setting continually shift in position in depth. One of Schoenberg's piano pieces, Op. 19, No.5, is an interesting reproduction in miniscule scale of the shape of Wagner's scene: it is a four-phrase melody, articulated chiefly by background material, which "moves out" at the joints and thickens the cadences. In contrast to this, the several mosaic-like figures which make up Debussy's Prelude, Voiles, for example, are put together in such a way as to minimize the difference be- tween figure and ground. This piece, as compared to the Wagner or Schoen- berg, might be said to be quite "flat" and two-dimensional. The freedom to manipulate background and foreground is achieved in classic tonal homophony by an extraordinarily systematic organization of an integrated musical space. Continuity no longer depends upon a thread-like connection from one tone to the next, but rather upon more abstract func- tional connections between simultaneous triadic units. These functional relations support a space so clearly organized in itself that only the skeleton need be indicated, over which motifs, rhythms, and themes may be quite freely thrown. To hear in this "tonal" manner, I must stop perceiving the whole freely and circumscribe my hearing. I subordinate the musical world to a single point of view, as in the analogous way of looking at a visual space organized by classic perspective. Both ways of perceptual organization de- pend upon so-caned "natural" relations-holding among triads, on the one hand, among objects, on the other. Both assume a "common-sense" manner of hearing or seeing, clearly and distinctly reflecting in perception the evident, and hence, "natural" order of the real world. VI (Heard time) Now let me turn briefly to our perception of time, in order to emphasize one point: that we organize time differently at different levels. What holds together "a piece" of time? Perhaps our most fundamental sense of time is indeed one of continuity, of an irreversible flux, in which the separate moments of lived experience fuse and interpenetrate, growing dim as they recede into the past. This in- exorable flow is marked, especially for the Westerner, by the point at which he stands and the perspective this throws on past and future. But time, even for the Westerner, does seem to be, above all, a stream. However, in order to perceive time, we must perceive change-either a change that has happened or a change taking place. We do not perceive sheer duration, independently of something that endures. And a duration, either filled or empty (as a gap) is a definite interval, grasped only in relation to change, i.e., to succession. Further, we do not perceive succession itself in terms of its elements or the intervals between them, but rather as a schema of relations, an organization-i.e., a rhythm. Especially in music, time, as we hear it unfold in a melody, for instance-"musical" time-has to do with 77 distinction and order as well as interpretation and fusion. The comprehen- sion of succession requires some sort of similarity among its elements, some sort of differentiation between them, and a certain limit during which they can be grasped. There are two facts about the perception of time which are especially interesting in regard to music: First, we perceive differently continuous change and discontinuous change, as transformation or as succession, re- spectively. Secondly, we perceive discontinuous change differently, according to its rate of speed, as flicker or as true succession.23 Although we tend to group any recurring stimuli into an organization, we group such forms at, various levels according to these basic differences in perception. In music, we group, for example, at the level of figure, at the level of theme or line, and at the level of piece or object. Ex. 3 Claude Debussy, Preludes, Bk. I, No.2, "Voiles" Modere e)J= 88) (Dans un rythme sans rigueur et caressanil How then do we hear a succession? To perceive mere succession as such requires the perception of before and after as somehow simultaneous, i.e., as occurring within a single mental present; it is a multiple apprehension. Now Ex. 4 Edgard Varese, Ionisation J =69 - Gong (high) Tamtam (low) J . J ..... 4 ) 4 {" j) P J. - 1> 4 4 p- J ---r-- 4 1"4 P - Side drum Bass drums (high) (low) V P I >. r [ "- !::L..[ (high) Sirens (low) Snare drum .-/4 IPPP--==== J "-4 PP]J -...... /4 j) Cymbal (suspended) jpp .§i. i'"';. 4 ) ... =:: 4 pp :::=--= ppp Cymbals 4 '4 P'-I- -- 78 perception is an act of integration which itself takes time; an instant is not a durationless point. We can grasp as whole a series of changes provided the interval that embraces them is not too long. This length of time depends on various factors, chiefly the direction of our attention and the possibilities given in the stimuli for organization. Ordinarily, as I have said, its upper limit is about 5 or 6 seconds. What I grasp, even in this instant, is an entity-a musical element, for example-a motif, a rhythm, a configuration of sound, a splash of tonal color. A musical figure fills an "instant"; a melody extends it. Listen, for example, to the opening ideas in a few of the pieces I have men- tioned: The first figure of Debussy's Voiles is clocked by the composer at about 4 seconds. The first figure of Ionization is marked at less than 2 seconds, but the sustained background sound moves forward, fills the space, and ex- tends it to about 11 seconds. The first phrase of Chopin's Etude (which is, in fact, a piece of a melody) takes about 8 seconds. The opening measure of Bach's Prelude spans an interval of about 7 seconds (and remarkably divides it, in time as well as space, in a symmetrical way). The apprehension of musical form involves at least two distinct levels of integration: At the level of smallest unit or formal element are those musical events which are grasped as whole within a single mental act-a figure, a . gesture, a phrase. But these elements are in turn gathered up into larger wholes-a melody, an action, a discourse. The primitive condition for an extended form which is grasped as whole, whether it be an area in space or a stretch of time, is a bounded field with possibilities for organization. Such a field is neither sheer continuity (such as a grey fog or the distant roll of the ocean) nor uninterrupted pattern (for ex- ample, a child's endlessly reiterated bit of melody or an expanse of grillwork). A true Gestalt lies somewhere in between. A musical whole, like any other, can be stylized in either direction. For example, let me indicate how these two polar possibilities for form apply to repetition. In any temporal form, repetition both extends and articu- lates matter. Its essential function is not to produce symmetry or closure, as in spatial form (although it can indeed serve this purpose), but rather to establish an identity, an element, which thereby differentiates itself and per- sists in time, remaining somehow constant under change. In music, any parameter of sound can generate such an entity; two of the most familiar are durational pattern and patterns of pitch. But not all music is essentially repetitive. And further, any kind of repetition can be constructive or non- constructive and, if constructive, tight or loose. The different effects of different kinds of repetition reflect differences in the way we perceive any change. At the most basic level, we perceive continuous stimuli differently from discontinuous stimuli. Rhythm in the restricted sense of a regular reiteration of pattern is an obvious example of our tend- ency to organize any stimuli given as discretely separate: we tend to group regularly recurring stimuli (given at a moderate rate) into patterns of two's or 79 three's. But there is as well a rhythm of continuous change, a rhythm of transformation, growth, motion. Rhythm in this wider sense is the prepara- .• tion of one event by the last-the way in which one wave or one gesture, for instance, arises out of another. Immediate repetition (reiteration) has been distinguished from repetition that returns after some time (recurrence),