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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2025
Unlike the pointillist-serial aesthetics of the mid-twentieth century, contemporary music employs narrative strategies that stimulate listeners to form mental constructs. This involves using the potential of mid-level formal units to establish orientation points for the listener, exploring two repetitive models (deadlocked time and frozen time) that emerge as discrete building blocks from the current cognitive-theoretical perspective. Through analogical thinking, this article seeks to explain the potential references of these repetition-occurrences towards a temporal suspension and provides multiple examples based on selected passages from Ivan Fedele (b. 1953), Matthias Pintscher (b. 1971), Gérard Pesson (b. 1958), Unsuk Chin (b. 1961) and Michael Jarrell (b. 1958). This inquiry suggests an apprehension capable of bringing an expressive stand to the forefront. It also scrutinises how cognitive approaches revolving around analogical thinking can be employed extensively in the analysis of post-tonal music.
1 Kramer, Jonathan D., Postmodern Music Postmodern Listening (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., 2016), p. 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Kramer, Jonathan D., Time of Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988)Google Scholar.
2 Meelberg, Vincent, New Sounds, New Stories: Narrativity in Contemporary Music (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2006), p. 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Structuring according to the serial rule problematises the listener's ‘perceptual affinity with its material and structure’. Denis Smalley, ‘Spectro-Morphology and Structuring Processes’, in The Language of Electroacoustic Music, ed. Simon Emmerson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986). See also Denis Smalley, ‘The Listening Imagination: Listening in the Electroacoustic Era’, Contemporary Music Review, 13, no. 2 (1996), pp. 77–107.
4 Mario Baroni, ‘The Macroform in Post-Tonal Music – Listening and Analysis’, Musicae Scientiae, 7, no. 2 (2003), p. 226.
5 See, for example, Susanne Langer's discussion of ‘movement of audible forms’ in Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons New York, 1953), p. 125.
6 In the twentieth century, the music of György Ligeti, Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Penderecki provided examples of works in which textural formations at the mid-level became the main musical building blocks. Within the European post-war avant-garde Ligeti's music holds a unique position, its clearly perceptible trajectory accommodated by unified mid-level formal units, some of which project extramusical references of time and space. These are discussed by Ulrich Dibelius in his book on Ligeti; he discusses how particular musical units have certain effects, defines them as ‘types’ and explains that they are used by Ligeti as ‘Satztechnischen Modellen’. Ulrich Dibelius, Ligeti, Eine Monographie in Essays (Mainz: Schott, 1994), pp. 79–80. See also Amy Bauer, ‘Tone Color, Movement, Changing Harmonic Planes: Cognition, Constraints and Conceptual Blends in Modernist Music’, in The Pleasure of Modernist Music, ed. Arved Ashby (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2004), pp. 121–52.
7 Adessi and Caterina, for example, compare the degrees of segmentability in the music of Darius Milhaud, Bruno Maderna and Anton Webern, in Anna R. Adessi and Roberto Caterina, ‘Perceptible Musical Analysis: Segmentation and Perception of Tension’, Musicae Scientiae, 4, no. 1 (2000), pp. 31–54.
8 Recent research in music cognition offers an alternative view on perception and cognition of musical gesture as an embodied experience. Marc Leman argues that ‘The mechanism behind gesture in music seems to be that, through embodiment, sonic forms can be understood from the viewpoint of the listener's action-oriented ontology, and this ontology can be linked with a framework of other gestures and topics, both intra- and extra musical. The reason we call musical patterns “gestures” has to do with the fact that they can be imitated through human body.’ Marc Leman, ‘Music, Gesture, and the Formation of Embodied Meaning’, in Musical Gestures Sound, Movement, and Meaning, eds Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 148.
9 Lawrence M. Zbikowski, ‘Conceptual Blending Creativity and Music’, Musicae Scientiae, 22(1) (2018), p. 13.
10 Zbikowski provides this clear distinction between the conceptual metaphor and its linguistic expression: ‘A conceptual metaphor is a cognitive mapping between two different domains; a linguistic metaphor is an expression of such mapping through language. For instance, the conceptual metaphor STATE OF BEING IS ORIENTATION IN VERTICAL SPACE maps relationships in physical space onto mental and physical states. The cross-domain mapping wrought by this conceptual metaphor then gives rise to innumerable linguistic expressions.’ Lawrence M. Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 66.
11 Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 29.
12 The idea of repetition is a phenomenon that exists in different dimensions in twentieth-/twenty-first-century music, including works based purely on immediately repeated material, as in minimal music or works incorporating loops as compositional strategy. See Tristan Murail, ‘The Revolution of Complex Sounds’, Contemporary Music Review, 24, nos 2/3 (2005), p. 124.
13 Elizabeth H. Margulis, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (New York: Oxford Academic, 2014), p. 9.
14 Gérard Pesson, Wunderblock (Nebenstück II), for accordion and orchestra (Paris: Éditions Henry Lemoine, 2005).
15 Such a situation correlates with the boundary schema discussed by Johnson: ‘The experience of blockage involves a pattern that is repeated over and over again throughout our lives.’ Johnson, The Body in the Mind, p. 45.
16 Matthias Pintscher, Reflections on Narcissus, for violoncello and orchestra (2004–2005) (Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, 2006).
17 Unsuk Chin, cosmigimmicks (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 2012).
18 Michael Jarrell, Reflections (Paris: Éditions Henry Lemoine, 2019).
19 Kramer, Time of Music, p. 55.
20 Pesson, Wunderblock (Nebenstück II).
21 Ivan Fedele, Études Australes, No. 4, ‘Aptenodytes’ (Milan: Edizioni Zerboni, 2003).
22 Roberto Prosseda notes that ‘Far from any mystic or explicitly scientific temptations, the reference to Aptenodytes here takes predominantly poetic and formal aspect: the staggering rhythm with which the penguins beat their wings becomes a starting point from which to explore, with the usual precision of writing, certain facets of the realm of timbre produced by piano resonances and the superimpositions of different rhythmic entities’. Roberto Prosseda, ‘Ivan Fedele and the Piano’, in Ali di Cantor: The Music of Ivan Fedele, ed. Cesare Fertonani (Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 2011), pp. 359–74. See also Ivanka Stoianova, ‘Ivan Fedele: Towards a New Humanism’, in Ali di Cantor: The Music of Ivan Fedele, ed. Cesare Fertonani (Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 2011), pp. 19–44.
23 This echoes Larson's definition of ‘musical inertia’ as ‘the tendency of a pattern of motion to continue in the same fashion, where the meaning of “same” depends on how that pattern is represented in musical memory’. Steve Larson, ‘Melodic Forces: Gravity, Magnetism, and Inertia’, in Musical Forces, ed. Steve Larson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), pp. 82–109.
24 Roig-Francoli, Miguel A., Understanding Post-Tonal Music (New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2007), pp. 267–68Google Scholar.
25 Jarrell, Reflections.
26 See, for example, Holyoak, Keith and Thagard, Paul, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (Cambridge, MA: MTI Press, 1994), p. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘the exploration of the analogy is guided by the person's goals in using it, which provide the purpose for considering the analogy at all’.
27 ‘That said, what is important for my argument is less the fidelity of such images with Sagregas's compositional inspiration and more the notion that sound sequences can prompt these sorts of mental constructs in the first place. That this should be so reflects humans’ capacity for analogy and (building on Barsalou's theory of perceptual symbol systems) the ways conceptual knowledge that is derived from perceptual information can be connected to other kinds of conceptual knowledge through shared configurations of properties and relations.’ Zbikowski, Lawrence M., Foundations of Musical Grammar (New York: Oxford Academic, 2017), p. 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.