I am inclined to believe that in our literature there are lots of "pieces" which we call compositions, and lots of compositions which we do not recognize as such because they are seen as subordinate to a higher order which is non-compositional. The investigation of musical structure remains the primary task of the musicologist as a preliminary step to the understanding of the composition. By way of comparison, the contemporary theorist, frequently a composer himself, has been compelled by historical necessity to formulate the theoretical conditions governing much of the music of his 'time. In doing so, he has been much more successful than the musicologist concerned with the historical past. "Form analysis" and "style analysis" in the traditional sense have failed to provide us with significant insight. Robert L. Hall, Music as the form if World "If music," commands the Duke in subjunctive uncertainty, "be the food oflove, play on." No lover would ever doubt that the music should continue; philosophers have never been quite sure. How can the mere patterning of outer sound create, of itself, inner emotion? or in any way express it? Or does music merely symbolize emotion in some nonverbal way, presenting us with an analytical understanding of it? Is music philosophy or is it feeling? From this central query our insight into the nature of music must stem. The nature of music must follow from the nature of man. Of him we can say with certainty that he is conscious of a total World, earth and heaven, with which he must deal. The nature of that World, however, depends upon the fundamental way he happens to apprehend it. For a different person, for a different culture, for a different time of life, or even for a different mood, there may be a different way in which things are found to relate to each other and to the whole. A World, then, is the pattern of happenings within an over-arching form. It is an integrated way of experiencing the universe. The World pattern of a mere mood-say love or despair-is but a variation on the more basic World pattern of the individual, and this but a version ofthe underlying pattern of the culture, whose most fundamental form may per- sist, through various stages, over milleniums. The essential point to be understood about a World form is that it is a way of experiencing, not a structure of thought. Only secondarily is it subject to conceptualization. True, we must conceptualize it in order to understand it- the philosophies of a period are different versions of this-but it need not be conceptualized in order to be lived. While a World form may feature, for example, salvation or the transitoriness of all things, and these may be con- ceptualized in the religion, science, or philosophy of the time, they are grounded in a way of experiencing which is prior to formulation. 4* 105 A World to him who holds it is objective reality. Since it involves readiness to respond, it elicits certain constant preparatory muscular tensions. Seen by another person as capabilities and propensities, it is character. Ifshared, it is the character of the group or of the culture, their style of life, their way of being. What happens when the individual is faced with an urgent situation for which his World makes inadequate provision? His World recasts itself the best way it can for effective action while his body prepares for extraordinary activity. This correlated transformation of World and body is the nature of emotion. The emergency body measures (activities of the sympathetic ner- vous system) are basically the same in all cases. The kind of World trans- formation, and correspondingly, the kind of emotion experienced, ranges from the narrowing, constricting effect of fearful or humiliating situations to the broadening, expansive effect of joyful or love situations. If the effect per- sists but with the individual's awareness of the transformation, it becomes mood; if permanent, it is absorbed into the very nature of the objective World. If a World form is a pattern of experience, how is it constituted? Its essence is Rhythm in its broadest sense, that is, anticipated recurrence. All life con- sists of responses, innate or learned, for dealing with events which continually recur. It is fundamentally dependent upon being able to deal with like objects in like ways. It is equally dependent upon the remission between recurrences to provide for utilization, for rest and repair, for the necessary leverage for movement, and for a chance to deal with other functions. Eating, breathing, walking, working all depend upon rhythmic alternation. In a human World the endless complexity of interlocking cross-rhythms are integrated into even higher rhythmic unities to enable us to deal with them overall. A World pattern is then the means for dealing by anticipation with the most under- lying Rhythm-the ultimate way of things, e.g. evil and salvation, or tem- porary meaningfulness and ultimate disintegration. In precisely what does this Rhythm of experiencing inhere? We only know things in action, or with potentiality for action, and the space in which this can occur. Now space can only be apprehended in terms of what can happen in it. For a physicist dealing with the reality of cosmological or sub-atomic space, or for a painter dealing with the significance of the space containing a given set of objects, the variable, almost plastic, nature of space reflecting the kinds of events able to occur in it is readily understood. The rest of us tend to conceive of space as a vast, uniform emptiness. This concept is useful for a number of practical considerations of distance and the interchangeability of volumes, but it is only an abstraction. While we may think of space that way, we actually experience it otherwise without often realizing it. Occasionally the plasticity of space does become apparent to us-for instance, when we go back to a town we lived in long ago, or visit where we once worked, and its space seems to have shrunken along with our changed relationship to the place. Or on other occasions we experience what we refer to as a certain 106 atmosphere, a sense of something in the air, meaning that there is the potential, experienced spatially, for certain types of things to happen. Since space reflects potential occurrence, it is set up initially by actual happenings, motions which are then taken as repeatable. It is this expressive action space which is the pattern of expected recurrence, of Rhythmic ex- perience. Space, so understood, is the form of World. Art, including music, enables us to experience directly other more profound forms of World. To understand this we must remember that any relatively isolated group of elements, be they lines, sounds, body movements or what- ever, if interrelated, create a space of their own. Some elements are so reminiscent of actual experiences they tend to evoke corresponding responses. For example, the experience of accomplishment leading to new vistas is so like that of an actual upward ascent that certain rising lines re-awaken a tendency within us to respond that way. Similarly, despair has a form oflet- down that certain downward lines tend to produce within us. In general, certain forms of line or color or volume or sound have dynamic qualities to which we react. The artistic creator, whatever his medium, combines such elements, building them rhythmically to create an experiential totality with its corresponding virtual space. This experiential space, reflecting the form of the work of art, is made to parallel the actual space which is the form of the basic cultural World. In so paralleling, it can provide a deep commentary on World in experiential terms-hence the profound significance of a great work of art. The sensation of our everyday World being transformed in the artistic experience of such an enriched World is the aesthetic emotion. It is in the perspective of this philosophy of World that I would like to re- cast a number of valuable insights of Patricia Carpenter's article "The musical object." Let us consider first the analysis of the nature of sound as the foundation of music. The World as perceived by a human being is primarily a visual world full of basically tactual objects. In general, sound emanating from a seen object simply adds to the object's already established character. It is in bringing us the unseen that sound takes on a unique role: warning of hidden danger, foretelling unperceived goals, signalling the out-of-sight presence of loved ones. As such, we apprehend not the sound in isolation but the whole situation: the approaching heavy truck, the children at play. Sound extends the immediate visual world and its space. Except as a useful abstraction there is no separate acoustic world or acoustic space. Rather, sound often trans- forms our perceived World. Sound was the primary herald of danger in the primitive world, and often enough today the blare of a horn, or the shout of "Look out!," or the screech of brakes, or the sudden piercing wail of a child in pain instantly transforms the significance of the World before us and galvanizes us into action, hopefully effective. Thus sound instigates emotion. We are used to reacting to it. Indeed, language capitalized on sound as the transformer of the significance of the perceived world, using it as its only 107 medium for tens of thousands of years, in tum enhancing its significance for us. The perceived World with its forms embedded in its space is built by us wholly on the ground of Rhythm. What happens if some Rhythm of sound is set up which by its nature will permeate that World and its space? In the extreme case, if the visual input is very narrowly restricted and the Rhythm of a spoken chant given central attention, the perceived World may be com- pletely wiped from consciousness and replaced by any other perceived World the rhythm-maker describes-this is the case of hypnotism. More typically, if, as in music, we build further Rhythmic sound structures at different levels on top of a basic one, their total interrelationship creates a space which replaces the original space of the perceived World. The effect is World dramatically transformed-emotion, or when sustained, mood. The space of music is created by movement resulting from patterns of anticipated recurrence temporarily deferred. These patterns operate at various levels of rhythm: beat, meter, phrase, harmonic progression, or other unit of organi- zation. It is a complex space, then, of tension and release, exactly that space which the mood created by the music would form in the World if created by an actual situation. The space of a particular mood created by the music may be exploited by words or actions, or both, which enhance the effect with an appropriate con- crete situation-hence song, dance, marching music, opera, background music for drama. Indeed some music practically compels physical activity by the listener. A musical beat is an alternation of impulse and release; the meter and rhythm depend upon regular alternations of strong and weak beats. We respond through our own inner tension and release. Fail to provide adequate release by unduly strengthening the accent, by throwing in accents on the weak beat, or by cutting into the release of the beat itself, and the body feels forced to provide for itself the necessary release by actually moving on the next accent. However mood-producing, music must basically parallel the form of the cultural World, for mood is only a variation of this World. With regard to cultural World forms, we now come to the historical aspect of Miss Carpenter's paper and to a brief commentary on her distinction between primitive, medieval, and modem Western musical apprehension. The primitive World with which we here wish to compare that of the West is essentially the Neolithic as we understand it, reconstructed in part from the modem primitive and the similar stage in the development of the child. Such primitive Worlds can be broadly characterized conceptually as composed of basic events, eternally recurring, consisting in essence of the presence of the appropriate spirit-being. One coped with this World by in- voking the needed spirit event. Music was a major way of accomplishing this through its powerful compelling rhythms, supplemented by words and dance gestures, which suggested and often, indeed, produced the invoked event-be it sex or war. The parallel of musical pattern to World pattern could not be 108 more complete. The action space of both was the occurrence of the spirit event; what mattered was neither the overall structure nor the process as such of producing it, but, rather, the immediacy of the successful invoking. From his primitive world, man progressed through major stages of evolving consciousness in terms of deepening World pattern until he came to the post-Classical age. Throughout its history prior to this century, Western culture dealt with that level of consciousness which organized World, con- ceptually speaking, as an underlying reality rationally giving rise to each surface aspect of nature. During the medieval period the World form was cast in terms of the Divine containing within itself the rational ordering principle producing the universe. Musically this was first accomplished by the powerful hypnotic Rhythm of a solemn chant cast in the rational frame- work of the Greek-derived modes, which created an experiential reality for the Divinity expressed in the sacred words. The evolution of this World during the medieval period was in successive stages, each articulating more fully the over-all rationality of nature. Within a rational framework of the rhythmic and melodic modes, the music sup- porting the Divinity-evoking words increasingly elaborated the earthiness of folk music and dance rhythms-;:-as secular music, in turn, incorporated procedures of complexity from sacred music. The essence of all this music was neither the structure of the whole (although this factor was becoming more prominent) nor the process in its own right, but the successful invoking of Divinity as central to the World space. By contrast, in the period from the 17th through the 19th century, the central place in the World space was increasingly occupied by underlying rational physical law. This abstract rationality was paralleled by the coming to the fore of purely instrumental music. The modes, each appropriate to a different type of mood, had afforded rational musical equivalents to different approaches to situations. They now coalesced into the major and minor scales, providing a new, more general framework for mood-structuring. The major scale could be considered the musical equivalent of the general form of taking a positive approach to a situation: proceeding up the scale to the tonic goal, there were two vigorous whole steps followed by the half step of "closing in," all repeated as a second stage of approach in the second tetrachord; the down side "leaving" was con- versely reluctant. The minor scale was the reverse case: in the ascent, after the initial step, a half step preceded two wholes in each tetrachord, presenting the general form of reluctance to approach a situation; going down, there was the corresponding quickness to leave. The reduction of the modes, with their specific characteristics, to two general frameworks opened up a further change paralleling the increasing emphasis on a World of dynamic natural laws. Compromises with natural systems of tuning enabled one both to maintain a basic form of major or minor and to vary this form subtly through scale transpositions. The pos- sibility of dynamic change was created through a fundamental principle, 109 modulation-an exact parallel, to give one example, to the new scientific conception that a few fundamental laws of nature such as the law of gravita- tion could be dynamically applied to a variety of individual situations. (Of course, further close musical parallels within this general framework can be cited to the more particular World forms of each era;) In order for a listener to appreciate such a unified musica] form, paral- leling the new general form of World, he had to view the progress of the piece as a whole. If the complex sequential development of moods were to be grasped, the piece had to be seen in its totality. The listener's sole pre- occupation with the moment-to-moment impact of a piece was thereby necessarily altered; the composition had to be seen as a separate entity, like an object which can be set apart at a distance and whose completeness creates a space of its own. It had to be appreciated as a total dynamic process, with a corresponding space formed of the interrelationship of all its elements from beginning to end. So considered, its space paralleled that of the basic World of the 17th through the 19th century. What then of today ? If the philosophy of World as here briefly outlined is valid, it must, ipsofacto, apply to itself. The World form of today then must be . precisely the reaYization that the World is essentially human-formed. Rather than residing in a set system of laws of nature, each system is relative to the observer. This is paralleled in music by the abandonment of classic triadic tonality as a structuring element, in favor of new modes of procedure. In the absence of such a culturally pre-given framework, both composer and listener are required to construct significance in relation to each new work. Similarly, the exploitation of spontaneity and unpredictability emphasizes that meaning is whatever you choose to make it. So too, the strong syncopated rhythms of jazz project one forcefully out of this everyday world into more dramatic ones for the sheer experience of taking the trip. Where it will go now, there is no telling. Yet it is clear that music, like all Art, in dealing with the experiential is as essential as science for the develop- ment of our consciousness of World. One can only say, play on. Maria Rika Maniates, Musical form: product and process Since it is impossible in the short space allotted for respondent papers to discuss all the points raised by Miss Carpenter, I should like to focus on what is, to my mind, the most original contribution of her brilliant essay. Her distinction between musical form as externalized product, or a whole piece of music, and musical form as internalized process, or a random series of musical events, yields extremely important ramifications for both our ontological and historical conceptions of music. To mull over terms such as "objective, articulated, spatial, organic, architectonic" is not to quibble over 110