Ericson JMT Winter1963

Yale University Department of Music
Time-Relations Author(s): Robert Erickson Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Music Theory, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter, 1963), pp. 174-192 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the Yale University Department of Music Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/843108 . Accessed: 06/02/2013 15:32
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Duke University Press and Yale University Department of Music are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Music Theory.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded on Wed, 6 Feb 2013 15:32:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
174
Time-
Relations
Our sense of time, both in music and in other activities of our waking life, depends primarily upon the mental faculties of memory and attention. Without awareness there are no perceptual events, and memory bridges the gaps in time when our attention falters. Memory and attention make it possible for us to anticipate the future. Because human beings are able to remember and anticipate they have created time and its categories: past, present, future. Of these categories the most interesting (and the one most misunderstood) is the present. We know the present exists - it is "now". We live in it, like a fish lives in water. If one were a fish it would probably be [This paper was read at the 1962 Symposium of Contemporary Music sponsored by the School of Music, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Illinois. i
175
ROBERT ERICKSON
difficult to define water, and it is no easier conceptualize the flow of our existence. for us humans to
in The Concept of Nature: Alfred North Whitehead writes, "What we perceive as present is the vivid fringe of memory The phrase might seem to imply that tinged with anticipation". the present hardly exists, but that is not the point he is making here. He is emphasizing the fluid and on-going quality of our time perception; the fact that the present is a vivid fringe does not mean that it must be instantaneous. Whitehead's choice of the word, fringe, implies extension of some sort; and this vivid fringe, the psychological present, as it is usually called, always has thickness, duration. It is variable from quite long to quite short, and the present should not be conceivedof as some sort of dimensionless slit past which time flows. There are
17(
no durationless instants in perception. dynamic unity and because it is charduration the psychological present is of the flow of events, and, I believe, factor in our sense of rhythm.
Precisely because it is a variable in acteristically fundamental to our sense the most important single
The psychological present is a true unity, a perceptual unity, but it is fluid, moving, stretchable, like an accordion. There is nothing static about it. In the phrase, "a present is the vivid fringe of memory", one is presented with the possibility of the blending of one present into another, and a moment of introspection will demonstrate that the blending may also involve an So the conception of psychological overlapping of presents. present by no means implies only one happening per given Our mental faculties are such that we can sense a present. Take the example diversity of events within a unified present. of driving an automobile in traffic: during the time it takes me to shift from one gear to another I may, and I often do, feel that particular time span as a unit; yet, during that time I may also be aware of many things - cars coming toward me at various speeds, others hovering close to my speed and moving slowly in relation to me; and I may even be somewhat aware of the motion of other events, such as the flight of birds or people walking. Within a present one does not focus attention on everything at the same time; some motions occupy the center of my attention when I am driving and others recede to become background or potential foreground; moreover, foreground and background elements are constantly changing. This might sound like a description of chaos, except that we do it every day. From experience we know we are able to sense a number of events within a unified present. In the gear shifting situation there are events which are quite slow and events which are quite fast. My perception of that present, and the number of motion elements I am aware of, will depend largely upon the focus of my attention. Further, it is well to keep in mind that this particular present cannot exist all by itself. The shifting of gears will be part of a larger organization of overlapping, rather hazily defined presents, and this larger organization may offer a number of different time series to my attention. The phrase, time series, implies some sort of order. Time ordering in science, social life, and in music too, relies upon time counted in regular units of some sort. The size of the counting unit in scientific work can be anything from a light year to a microsecond. In ordinary human activities the size of the unit is determined by the perceptual situation and the
17T
fact that the unit must be smaller than the event. Thus slower events may have longer units. The unit size, whether fast or slow, has limits determined by our physical and neurological makeup. Scientific work and ordinary human activities both use counting, but regular counting in human time perception is by no means the same thing as the kind of time measurement we use clocks for. In scientific method an event cannot be described without a conventional and convenient scale of measurement. Perceptual time is rigorously excluded, as it must be. But our dependence upon clocks in our social and scientific activities, and the rationalized assumptions about time which our clockdominated life fosters, can blunt our sensitivity to the richness and variety of our potential time experience. Our clocks may easily lead us to believe that minutes and seconds are somehow ultimate time particles, and that psychological time is illusory and of no moment. On the contrary, psychological time is primary to life, and therefore to art. Not everything in this life can be counted out. Beyond the practical and social world of clock ordered events there is the inner world, the world of feeling, the musical world, where we live - in a swirl of overlapping presents, a flux where events happen at a multiplicity of unit speeds, where the units themselves are subject to distortions, and where uncounted episodes, unit-free durations, are a large part of our experience. Our sense of time comes closest to clock time when we are experiencing a regular succession of perceptually eqial units. When the units become very very long the experience becomes that of unit-free duration, unless it is filled in, broken up into smaller units, which may form the long duration by addition. When the units become very short they blur into texture. The texture, in turn, may be experienced as unit-free or it may be formed into perceptually manageable units, depending upon the musical situation. These special cases aside, when we experience the regular succession of perceptually equal units we have the effect of tempo in its traditional sense, and the question might be put, "Is tempo of some sort a necessary condition for musical organization?" I do not believe it is. In my opinion the notion of strict tempo, so suitable to much of the music of the 17th and 18th centuries, needs to be replaced by a point of view more in keeping with contemporary experience and more harmonious with new attitudes toward other musical dimensions.
178
I do not mean that there is no room for the tempo concept in contemporary music, but older, rigid ideas about tempo have been changing for 150 years, and our theoretical constructs should take these changes into account. For example, tempo does not necessarily disappear in music, or in our other time experience, when events are ordered in unequal units. Stravinsky's Danse Sacrale is an excellent example of unequal unit music which preserves tempo of a sort, and in our everyday experience of motion and the passage of time we often feel a tempo or pace in a series of events, even though the events might not be ordered in a strictly regular way. Think of baseball, where one game might be fast paced and another excruciatingly slow. We are certainly sensitive to perceptual regularity, but we are also able to "average out" rapidly shifting velocities and durations. The reason that tempo is preserved in Stravinsky's Danse Sacrale and much other contemporary music (for that matter in much traditional music too) is mainly because we are able to perceive ratios between durations. Whole number ratios such as one-half, one-third, one-fourth, two-thirds and threefourths are easily within our capabilities and have been used in music for centuries. Much of our traditional notation is nothing more than a system of symbols for expressing these simple ratios. Higher number ratios, such as one-fifth, onesixth, one-seventh, four-fifths, are five-sixths, six-sevenths, more ambiguous; they may reduce to perceptually simpler ratios, depending upon the musical situation; or they may be perceived as incommensurable, especially at slower speeds, and therefore will be sensed as unit-free durations. Much of our time experience is of this character, hovering between ratio and unit-free duration. This is the time of our unclocked real existence. Time experienced in this way as duration, as an uncounted psychological present, ambiguous in the sense that it may, with a flicker of perception, be experienced as ratio, exists in traditional music only under the sign of the fermata and the pause, and at the whim of the performer. This is excellent as far as it goes, and I do not in any way wish to narrow the region of the performer's freedom; but any music which takes as its point of departure the belief that rhythm is more than the pounding of a trip-hammer will be likely to exploit this aspect of our time experience too, to use, organize and control unit-free durations, especially those which have an ambiguous relationship with ratios, in order to bring them into the composer's domain.
179
I favor a music which addresses itself to our whole range of time perception. I havetried to show how regular units, ratios of irregular but commensurable units, incommensurable units and unit-free durations are all important to our experience of time, and I have hinted that time clicked off in perceptually equal units was by no means the only facet of our time experience which may be useful in music. But I do not wish to leave the impression that perceptually regular units are no longer a valid and valuable rhythmic device. It is not a question of elements merely substituting irregular and incommensurable for regular and commensurable ones. It is rather that contemporary music would be impoverished if it limited itself to the regularities and ratios bequeathed to us from the 18th cenand transmitted largely through notational tury and earlier, conventions which reflect attitudes about life far different from
ours.
This century has seen striking changes in musical rhythm. Before 1920 the door to a new rhythmic world was opened by Stravinsky and Bartok, each using his own brand of irregular but commensurable units; and jazz music, with its typical irregular, occasionally incommensurable and unit-free durations For example, in the against a background of rigid regularity. third movement of his Fifth Quartet Bartok uses several types of irregular units. The irregularity is reflected in the time for the scherzo and 3+2+2+3for signatures, 4+2+3 the trio. trio sintue, 8 8 for the Melodic and harmonic events support and emphasize these eighthnote groupings, making each measure irregular; but because of the fast tempos (the scherzo moves at 46 measures to the minute and the trio at 60 per minute) and because of the strict patterning, one perceives that, although there is irregularity within the measure, the measures themselves are all of equal length and similar pattern. Therefore, regularity moves up a level and includes the irregular units in a slower moving regular unit. What the composer gains, over and above a more interesting background pattern, is the option to syncopate in a more varied way than was possible in the traditional regular meters. There is regularity of another sort here too: the eighth note acts as a counter, filling in the half, the quarter and the dotted quarter. A rigid counter, used to produce irregular lengths by addition, is a common device of 20th century music. In this movement the steady eighth notes help to reinforce the feeling of smooth flow, but the speed of the eighth note is so fast, and the patterning is so consistent, that attention focusses mostly on the higher levels of phrase and period.
180
There is no such regularity of the larger unit in Stravinsky's Danse Sacrale*1. It is no accident that this composition is cited so often for its irregular meters and original phrase and Stravinsky is right when he remarks*2 in construction, one of his conversations with Robert Craft that no composer, to his knowledge, has extended the idea of variable meters farther. In the Danse Sacrale the measures of 2/8, 3/8, 5/8, 2/4, and 3/14 produce rhythmic phrases of varying length which reflect the irregularity of the metering on higher levels of phrase and There is patterning, but it is much richer in incident period. and far more unpredictable to the listener than Bartok's irregular patterning, because instead of fixing the irregular pattern in a meter, as Bartok does, Stravinsky constantly reshuffles his metrical units. To a composer for whom "the barline is much much more than a mere accent, and I don't believe it can be simulated by an accent, at least not in my music", *3 meters are not a notational convention; they are as much musical materials as chords and timbres, each meter carrying its particular character and individual pattern potential. An analysis of the music shows that Stravinsky never destroys the metrical sense, and never uses the meter as a mere aid to counting. The composed order syncopates, displaces and supports the potential of expectation in specific ways, thematic to the composition, and therefore, significant differences between notes taken "on" and "off-of" the beat. The figure carries different connotations in the forms, 3 'f and i . Changes of meter, as inp) 7 a shift from 3/8 to 2/4, or from 3/4 to 5/8, or between any, of the eighth note and quarter note meters imply, and require for their proper projection, a change of beating unit. The character of the motion cannot be adequately expressed in any other way. It is the very essence of the music. Only in the piano four-hand version did Stravinsky reduce all the meters to a single unit, the 16th, and in that version much of the disjunctive quality of the music is left unexpressed. Throughout the movement the two eighth, are linked and related. All in conjunction with an eighth rest, meter, are potential paths to the beating units, quarter and situations of an eighth note whether in 2/8, 3/8 or 5/8 quarter note meters. The
figure
result
Lfl
of having meters
is the usual path to an eighth note meter.

on two levels,
The
with paths between
181
levels, is a field of meters. The field (I use the word in the sense of a field of operations or a milieu) consists of two levels of duple and two of triple, together with 5/8 which appears as a real meter: 2/4 2/8 3/4
5/8
3/8 When composing my Duo for Violin and Piano I was not thinking about fields of meters or any other kind of field; I was working intuitively to produce the kind of music which I imagined. I knew that I wanted a quality of motion less tempo-bound than what I had previously composed. I had always used accelerando and ritardando in my music to ameliorate the "tickiness" of a rigidly held unit and to help establish the fluidity of motion which I wanted; and for the Duo I hit upon the compositional idea of combining certain musical events in disjunct but commensurable tempos, which sometimes would integrate with each other without any single tempo dominating, and at other times would be connected by means of accelerando and ritardando. What this turned out to be was a field of tempos. The chart, Example 1, outlines the principal tempo changes and changes of beating unit for the first movement. The most are between 44 and 66, ratio of 2/3; important relationships between 44 and its double, 88; and between 66 and 88, ratio 3/4. The other tempos are primarily nuances, but there is a hint, hardly more, of 40-60-80, which within the context of this movement acts as a slight ritardando of the 44-66-88, but which assumes more importance in the second movement; the tempos, 52 and 56 are mostly related to the opening materials of the movement. Measures 65 to 82, Example 2, illustrate some of the ways in which integrations between tempos are used, and some of the functions of accelerando and ritardando. To lead into the example, from measure 65 to measure 70 the music moves in meters of 9/16, 2/16 and 12/16, with the beating unit shifting from eighth to dotted eighth. At measure 70 there is a change of meter to 5/4, with thematic materials associated with the opening of the movement (and more particularly, with their development) except that the tempo is faster. In measure 72 and 73 the quarter note accelerates to 88, but at the same time the spacing of events is broadened. Between measures 74 and 75 the tempo changes abruptly from 88 to 66. It would have been perfectly possible to notate measure 74at the tempo of
182
figure
1
C)
66
5 44-.
88 44_
4 -6a
0
,
s
?Q~
s ._
(
@
,!676~
)so
( )
s-
6688- -
,,
8J,4
6Ls
P" J .1
44-
a,
44
eo
s11
183
figure
2
J) 66
65
po
a poco
dhn.
67
66
~
.f ,,_
a Poco poco occel.

i ,
-=
66
(46
i73
as _ - e3--* -"1r-l-,'' 74 7l
a
Poco
=6oL 3-'
poco rit.
....
.r
------
2 33
767
r
(a
-
87
_ _
e-
-6
44)Poco
poco CCCl.
rJnt.
,t J6e(Subito)
4=40
. :_ ,(r
5)
,.i :..==~, -4)P C

' ..:.f
_ -.Oeb. ,
!
l:.
::-
rit :,~
";"': t"
184
66 to the quarter note, because if =88 then l66; and if =66 thenI= 88. But I wanted the half note triplet units to be taken from the beat of 88 to the quarter, and I do not believe I could have achieved the kind of intensity embodied in this particular "off the beat" feeling in any other way. From measure 75 through measure 76 the quarter note slows down to 44, touching the lower end of the tempo field. In measures 77 and 78 it accelerates to 56, then drops back through 44 to its nuance, 40. Measure 78 begins a reminiscence, in the piano, of an important idea, and suddenly the violin starts off with its equally important material. The shift to 9/16 meter at the rate of 66 to the allows building the material associated ., into the 66 with the quarter note 44 What is involved tempo*4. here, and in the whole idea of building one tempo into another is not a mere notational game. It is a very different thing, if a 32nd note, for example, is taken as part of a musically, quarter note beating unit or as a part of a dotted eighth. The beating unit and its speed are primary musical categories. Any note length is in itself neutral and carries no specific meaning. It must be referred to a context which includes the speed of the beating unit, the position of the note in that unit, its articulation and its relation to other durations, not to speak of timbre, harmonic and melodic considerations. That is why there seems to me to be something incomplete in what is usually referred to as additive rhythm, where all lengths are made commensurable through one ultimate counter. The counter and its additive durations are only part of the whole rhythmic situation; the divisive idea is equally important. We are able to perceive shorter durations as fractional parts of a beat. In music both kinds of experience are likely to be happening concurrently, usually as elements in some larger process. From the experience of composing the Duo, and trying to understand what I had done, I realized that I had worked mainly with the actual durations of various note lengths relative to each other, to a counter and to a beating unit. During the composition of my Chamber Concerto, which followed the Duo, I found myself working with a larger number of tempos and counters, and I had a strong compositional desire to integrate all my speeds, counters, accents and durations in a nonrigid way. Therefore, I tried to be conscious of the various durations of all the note values I happened to be using, at whatever tempo and beating unit, and I found myself turning away from hierarchical rhythmic relationships toward a rhythm of constantly emerging and changing patterns of relationship.
185
Looking back at the Chamber Concerto, especially its final movement, it now appears that the term, field of tempos, which described the action of the Duo fairly well, is not very appropriate. It is too narrow, and it Carries connotations which do not seem to reflect the musical reality. What I was involved with in this movement was actually a field of durations, some stable and regular, some unstable and irregular, where relationships between durations, beats and counters changed in more complicated ways than the term tempo field could exTo convey some information about the way that I used press. that field of duration, and something of how the various musical elements interact, I have made two charts. The first chart, Figure 3, gives a rough approximation of the number of measures at a certain unit, relationships between the speeds of the various beating units and the disposition of the passages of acceleration and deceleration. The chart shows that the duration 36, and its double, 72; 63 and its double, 126, are the most used tempos, although in the actual music no tempo has any special perceived priority. If anything has a special importance it is the duration 72, (not the tempo, the duration) which is more central to my conception than the chart indicates, because one of the important ideas of the movement is a" semi- steady" duration of 72. The semisteady 72 is a sort of fluctuating and intermittent constant which threads through the movement. How it is built into beating units of different speeds may be illustrated by a section of the movement comprising measures 316 to 360. The chart in Figure 4 is a rhythmic skeleton of these measures. The notes in the little square boxes, in measure 316 and later, are performed according to the rule, "play any time during the beat exceptat the beginning". The brackets, beginning in measure 317, indicate built-in-durationsfor example, inmeasure 318 the number 7 under the bracket means that seven sixteenth notes added together produce the duration 72. Notice that the sevens are not the only lengths involved; nines and fives are significant too, as are the doubles and triples of seven. At measure 333 the semi-steady 72 motion is interrupted; it begins again at measure 351, where the semi-steady 72 is maintained through the accelerando. Thus, from measure 316 to 360 there are built-in lengths of 7/ 16ths, 5/16ths, 4/16ths and 3/16ths, all producing 72's, some of them steadier than others, depending upon the speed and acceleration of the beating unit. Throughout the movement there are many places where the 72 is expressed, but other semi-steady semi-steady lengths are important too, and sometimes these are used to produce "written in" accelerations and decelerations.
186
figure
3
S12612
126roa
106-90
90
72-~
63-9s
7 '2
72 1
~63
I
=
6048-
I\ B,-
984-
1261086-
o6
oo
90-0
726360-
72J.L
63
4.40-
P'94 40 f 40
9 40 3
187
figure
4
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
S7
T
7
it 5it (=72)
o2
1i;2 3
TEMPO
PI26
(=36) 328 329 330 331
Je3
332 333
325
326
327
74771'10
15
,,
16
S9 it 5 3
334
335
336
337 r-s;ST T3
338
339
340
9341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
36
..~~~
s o
.
356 -2
: ,iT V
.J.1
~~
36
352
353
354 7,
72
355
357
358
359
360
72
6o , 36 36 c
72) ('to~
188
The meters of the movement are mainly 4/4 and 2/2. Only a few other time signatures are used. Many relationships which fractions of might have been notated as rather complicated beats in a strict tempo are handled by changes of the beating unit. But my motive was not simply a desire to create a practicable notation. The beating unit and the ratios between speeds of beating units are integral to the music and my conception of its flow. Therefore the wide range of speed in the beating unit, from 24 to 126, is neither an accident nor a matter of convenience. For me, a beat is a present. It is the mental and perceptual "now". A beat is a unity, and it is no less a unity when it happens to be accelerating or when the flow of beats is flucI used this range of beating units in my Chamber tuating. Concerto in order to organize a flow of presents. The ratios between the various beating speeds are important, but equally important to me are the "irrational" situations where the beat is speeding up or slowing down, because in such situations wonderfully delicate rhythmic nuances may be exThe irrational relationships, pressed. controlled of course by the steepness of the acceleration or deceleration, are perhaps more important to me than the ratios between speeds of units, which are the obvious aspect of my field of durations. Especially when the beat is speeding up or slowing down, semisteady durations can create a composed irregular regularity which for me is the essence of growth and emergence. By composing without splitting the idea of regular-irregular into two parts, a kind of unit-free rhythm becomes possible. Sometimes durations which are close to being unit-free are measured out in beats. In measures 344 to 350, Figure 4, where there is a long ritardando on a single note, is such an instance, and there are other similar situations throughout the movement. Sometimes the semi-steady motions are heard in contexts which, though measured, are on the fringe of unitfreedom. The disjunct beating units toward the end of the movement, (Figure 3) especially when the ratio between them is other than that of one-half, one-quarter or one-third, and when the tempo of the beating unit is slow, will tend toward unit-freedom. Other elements which lean in this direction are the notes placed in boxes, such as those at the beginning of the chart, (Figure 4). As I mentioned earlier, they carry the rule, "play at any time during the beat except at the beginning". They are used usually to produce a harmonic cloud or to separate background materials from more precisely measured The amount of "irrationality" foreground elements. is, of course, controlled by the speed of the beating unit. All the
18g
boxes shown in Figure 4 are eighth notes with a steady beating unit, but there are places in the movement where boxes are used with acceleration and deceleration, and there are also boxes of other note lengths. The theorist runs a special risk, especially in these days of science and scientism, of reductive thinking. He must try to avoid the temptation to sweep under the rug those recalcitrant elements which do not fit his theory. Rigor and logic have created some theoretical edifices which are remarkable in their consistency and beautiful in their own right - but irrelevant. It is nice to be clean, tidy and elegant, but it is good to let the dirt show in a theory if the dirt is there. Time relations cannot, of course, be separated from other musical dimensions; indeed, many insights about rhythm have come about precisely because of the increasing inseparability of the various musical elements. Today harmony and timbre are a single category, and tend to merge withmelody and counterpoint into a broader musical idea which as yet has no name. We are involved with a many-faceted totality, in which all the musical relationships are imbedded in time in a unitary way. This is perfectly natural: the separation of music into various discrete elements has never been very satisfactory anyway, and has been perpetuated mainly by the notorious conservatism of the music curriculum. One feels and thinks and imagines in a unitary way, and it is within the context of this unity that time relations should be discussed. I do not possess the conceptual framework needed to analyse in this unitary way, although I recognize that this is what needs to be done, so I have done the next-best thing: I have focussed upon time and rhythm because they are integral to and inseparable from the whole musical event. In the 18th century, time, it appears, could be separated from the events which took place in it. Time, very much like 18th to be absolute, infinite and century space, was considered It is no longer possible today to think in terms homogeneous. of events clicking along an imaginary yardstick measuring out to infinity. This notion, with its abstract, spatialized concept of time, its knife-edge present and its rigid and therefore static notion of periodicity, belongs to a past world. Time, for us, is unitary with events, whether in science, in art or in ordinary life. There is no knife-edge present in human perception, and apparently there is no longer such a con-
190
The essencept in contemporary scientific thinking either. tially circular and rigid periodicity of 18th century time is bewhich turn out to be ing replaced by different periodicities, analogous to our bodily and mental processes. Biological periodicity is heterogeneous and unstable, but hetEvents (including musical erogeneity need not imply chaos. events) flow, and we perceive them in a constantly fluctuating This present, in all its variety, its present. psychological its heterogeneity, is nevertheless a unity, overlappingness, and in it we grasp the flow while the flowing is going on. This is important; we perceive the ability to grasp, to staticize, fluid and dynamic qualities of time, but the act of perception creates stabilities too. We need these stabilities for a number of reasons. So far as music is concerned, certain stabilities are essential if we are to enlarge the simple present. I have said that a beat is a present, but I hope I have made it clear that in principle beats can be any length, up to very long. If we keep in mind that memory, with the fixing of memory traces whichmemory implies, is essential to our perception, then the notion of a beat being a present may be seen to include potential larger presents formed from the continuing overlapping process. Consider a line of melody as we listen to it: we remember the significance of what has passed, sense the unfolding of the melody, and during that unfolding create a sense of the anticipated whole. The anticipated whole changes as we listen, because some of our anticipations will be confirmed and others will not. If all our anticipations were reinforced by the melody it would be likely to be heard as a dull tune indeed. Our changing anticipation is therefore not static, but it is a stability in the flow; we do staticize but the flow is not arrested. When I direct my attention inward to contemplate my own self. . .I perceive at first, as a crust solidified on the all the perceptions which come to it (from the surface, material world. These perceptions are clear, distinct, juxtaposed or juxtaposable one with another; they tend to group themselves into objects. .. But if I draw myself in from the periphery towards the center. . .I find an altogether different thing. There is beneath these sharply cut crystals and this frozen surface, a continuous flux, which is not comparable to any flux I have even seen. There is a succession of states each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it. In reality no one begins or ends, but all extend into each other. [Bergson]
191
When Bergson refers to the perceptions from the material world as frozen, solidified, he points to the juxtaposable, These frozen and juxtapo"thingness" of these perceptions. sable things are memories of objects and thoughts about objects, a class which could include musical objects too: themes, harmonies, sections of compositions, musical wholes. What is interesting here is that Bergson is using spatial words rather than time words to describe these "perceptions", in that way conveying, if I am reading him correctly, the sense that these things, which as he says may be juxtaposed, have a quality which is different from that of the flux of time. He makes a black and white contrast between the surface "perception" and the mind's center, but it seems to me that the image should contain not only fixed and frozen elements, but melting, slushy and liquid elements too, a range between crystalline stasis and the flux. If we extend his thought to include recognizable musical objects which may melt into flux - the objects themselves susceptible to change - then we can have relationships between the surface and the center. With this modification, his description of the flux as a succession of states, with each state announcing the next and containing the last, is the most realistic description of how we listen to music that I know; and when he adds that in reality no one state begins or ends and that they all extend into each other he is describing the way in which a well equipped listener comprehends a large musical organisation. How these states extend into one another has been expressed in more detail by Whitehead in The Concept of Nature. He describes the complexity and overlappingness in terms of what we could think of as a group of tempos: The difficulty as to discordant time systems is partly solved by distinguishing between what I call the creative advance of nature. . .and anyone time-series. We habitually muddle together this creative advance, which we experience as the perpetual transition of nature into novelty, with the single time series which we naturally employ for measurement. The various time-series each measure some aspect of the creative advance, and the whole bundle of them express all the properties of this advance which are measurable. In this bundle of discordant time-series, any one strand may measure something of nature. Whitehead's emphasis is upon the bundle; the error we make is to muddle nature into a single scale of time measurement. The creative advance of na-
192
ture simply will not reduce to a single time-series. Some of its properties at all. This view of may not be measureable of flux, and its nature experienced time, with its acceptance as perpetual is harmonious with today's modes of transition, and art. thought and feeling in both science music in which events are someIf, then, we wish to compose times contemporaneous but not simultaneous, in which there are occasionally clouds of tones, in which velocities are shiftin which the traditional of melody, ing and irregular, categories timbre and rhythm have a unitary recounterpoint, harmony, then a view of time such as Whitehead's, with its lationship, of nature into novelty, its fringe-like transition perpetual present and its creative advance of nature is, I believe, a true and proper one for us.
ere
SThere are three available versions of the Danse Sacrale. When he composed the dance Stravinsky could play it but did not know how to write it down. (SatDec. Le Sacre du His first 26, 1959, "Apropos urday Review, Printemps"). revision was for the performance of 1921, some measures shortened to being make the music more manageable for the conductor and clear for the orchestra. felt that the shortening the scansion of the music. Stravinsky alsq clarified Whether this applies specifically to the Danse Sacrale can be only a guess because in the Saturday Review article cited Stravinsky says that he possesses the only copy of the 1913 original score. The 1921 revision is the probable basis for the edition published by Boosey B&H 16333, which is in common Hawkes, concert use, and from which most are made. The composer's version for piano four-hands, recordings published in 1926, represents either a return to the original score of 1913, with its longer barring and meters in 16ths, or a new conception. The most recent version was made in 1943, "mainly to facilitate performance by means of an unit of beat:' easier-to-read 2 Stravinsky, day & Co., Ibid., 21 part is moving at 49.5, a nuance of the 44 tempo. I. and Robert Craft, Conversations New York, 1959)123. Inc., with Igor Stravinsky (Double-
3 4
The piano

Ericson JMT Winter1963

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Ericson JMT Winter1963

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Yale University Department of Music

is the usual path to an eighth note meter.

with paths between

a Poco poco occel.

,.i :..==~, -4)P C

(=36) 328 329 330 331

Вам также может понравиться