Toward a dynamic conception of musical

The long avoided question of form in contemporary music has become the subject of fierce debate. Texts by musicologists oscillate within the conceptual approach influenced by major philosophical writings and the very precise vision of a compressed and fixed form that results from analysis. Today it is becoming apparent that the perceptual approach is indispensable if we are to understand the dynamic aspects of form. The courageous commitment on the part of Roger Reynolds makes it possible for us to scrutinize a composer's intentions as well as the perceptual realities experienced by listeners in the process of hearing a work for the first time. It would be vain to hope for such a thing as analytic listening: the hypothesis that we are favoring here is that of an emerging protoform, otherwise known as fuzzy form, elementary form, outline, or sensible outline, i.e. readily perceived by the senses. It is founded mainly on surface features and then articulated by a rough and sometimes faulty succession of a limited number of emotional states. A dynamic conception of form gives precedence to surface elements. Repeated listenings allow for the building up of a more elaborate inner image of the form, not necessarily very close to what the composer might legitimately hope for, but nevertheless unavoidable in the course of analysis. In the end, it is the distance between these differing visions of the form that will decide the fate of the composition.

It is in vain that we might search for literature from the second half of the 20th century about any sort of consensual approach to form. It is a subject that people either like to argue about or to forget. There are many reasons for this. Integral serialism, during what might be termed its more intolerant period, when it was centered around material and language, saw the final destruction of the last remains of inherited forms. Schoenberg, for example, was accused of using obsolete forms at a time when the contributions he made to the renewal of language demanded that such forms be abandoned. But was Schoenberg really being so incoherent and contradictory? It can easily be imagined that he intuitively felt that future composers would be facing enormous difficulties if they strove to rigorously follow the new pathways laid out by Webern. Nobody can answer this question. The more audacious composers dared to take that step forward, and to build their experiments on the ruins of form. Everything has been tried: from the most absolute control to the most extreme degrees of indeterminacy. Some composers wanted to set up a rigorous logical link between material, language and form, others imported mathematical models, or architectural concepts, yet others went seeking in nature, or at the very heart of sound. There was certainly no lack of talent or of works of value, but in the final analysis it became evident that such a thing as the shared or common form no longer existed. It is against this background that the following statement from a French composer was made in 1975:¹

What I am looking for above all is form. Nowadays this is a completely neglected question, abandoned by everybody. And yet it is a fundamental question for music. We have not invented a single new form since the 19th century, not one. In fact we have destroyed forms one after the other. We have labored to create morphology but never syntax. We have worked on the sound, on the combinations of sound, on timbres, and admittedly we have taken giant steps in that direction The few composers who have discovered a personal language are no longer interested in anything else [...]. If a composer comes to the conclusion that he has discovered his language, then it is time for him to start thinking of form. Form that will be equal to our listening power and our concentration.

The above statement might be debatable as to one or two points; nevertheless it asks pertinent questions concerning the perceptual aspects of form and listening limits. Our statement does not arise out of bitterness or nostalgia. Composers today face more than a language problem. They must, so to speak "secrete" their own form, one that seems to best answer their aesthetic needs. Being a composer in today's world is difficult enough without the anguish of additional choices.

In conditions like these, it is easy to understand why the more inventive composers feel the need to explain their approach and justify their choices. They have contributed richly to a body of theoretical writing, which has proved a rich resource to musicologists. But this plethora of texts is not merely the result of changes in thinking. Such changes are having repercussions on music as well as on all other human activity. It is also the sign of a deep-seated fear that the public might not understand -- and this includes the highly cultured public, from whom the composer normally expects gratitude and legitimization. In their content, the texts oscillate between theory, auto-analysis and the standpoint of aesthetics. The question of form is sometimes relegated to one side, an attitude that has drawn fire from the musicologist Célestin Deliège. In his text "De la forme comme expérience vécue² he does not hesitate to use the word " taboo"³.

If we consider that form is a time-based experience, even if it is not only that, then we can hardly talk about it without reference to philosophy. The fact that a composition is time-based sends us back to other figures who confronted the question of time, from the ancient Greeks all the way to Gilles Deleuze.⁴ Some of them stand out: Bergson with his philosophy of continuity, observed in 1888 "that we cannot avoid borrowing, from the notion of space, the images that well-developed consciousness uses to describe the way it perceives time or for that matter any kind of succession [...]. ⁵” Gaston Bachelard has a different conception, unequivocally stating in La dialectique de la durée that "From Bergson we are ready to accept almost everything except continuity" ⁶. For Bachelard, "musical action is discontinuous, and it is the emotional resonance in us that gives it its continuity"⁷. Drawing the consequences of Relativity theory, Bachelard accepts "the plurality and the discontinuity of time"⁸. The notion of continuity in Bergson and that of discontinuity in Bachelard are indeed relevant in attempting to understand musical time. But it is in the 1905 Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins by Edmund Husserl that we find the most appropriate ideas. Célestin Deliège, in his text on the 'para-memory' referred to by Boulez concerning the new forms, very appropriately reminds us of the relevance of Edmund Husserl's propositions. The phenomenological approach taken by the German philosopher defines those very concepts of the original impression⁹, or primary memories, which he compares to the tail of a comet¹⁰ and to a state of "protention" or expectant waiting¹¹. Husserl teases out the specific character of "re_remembering”, or secondary memory¹² (Vergegenwärtigung, Re-präsentation ¹³). By dissecting the act of consciousness, using nothing more than the power of thought, Husserl uncovered elements that we cannot afford to ignore in any study of the nature of time.

Husserl, just like Bergson and Bachelard, refers to melody¹⁴. When Gisèle Brelet published her work Le temps musical [Musical Time] in 1949¹⁵, Husserl's Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins had not yet been translated into French and she therefore does not allude to it. However, she does look into the positions held by Bergson and by Bachelard, and their sometimes debatable statements concerning music. She further reproaches Schopenhauer and Bergson with "asking questions of music with the unavowed intention of confirming their own philosophy ¹⁶". She makes a distinction between aesthetic time and "pure” time, but recognizes that Bergson has his own merits:

Bergson, in a deeply intuitive way, understood that musical compositions, beyond any consideration of their form, are real-life conscious experiences that possess duration [...] musical form could not exist outside the musician's own inner personal time ¹⁷.

Brelet made it clear that she thought Bergson's relationship to music was too superficial for him to understand the specific nature of musical time. Although she had reservations about what she calls Bachelard's "atomic conception of time"¹⁸, based on the unfortunate example of the melody, she nevertheless considers the notion of discontinuity as being indispensable in the creation of time by thought. She further concedes that Bachelard, in La dialectique de la durée, gives a valid description of the various aspects of a kind of time that contains several layers or strata. Brelet felt it was inappropriate for a philosopher to capitalize on problems in music, and she argued that musical time is autonomous and exists in its own right. This declaration of the autonomy of music and musical phenomena belongs in the framework of aesthetics. It does not apply to the new forms of music, about which Gisèle Brelet showed herself to be very reserved indeed.

Most of the work done by musicologists on musical form lies halfway between a philosophy of time and analysis: the conceptual skeleton is provided by philosophy, and the analysis is founded on data provided by the composer, or produced by the musicologists' own research. Under the influence of that double approach and sometimes in spite of it, the perceptual aspects of form, which once encountered such mistrust, are now progressively emerging, composers themselves no longer considering the subject as taboo.

In addition, parallel research carried out concerning time and the ontogeny of time by such major figures in psychology as Paul Fraisse and Jean Piaget had opened up a third avenue that no composer could afford to ignore. Fraisse's Psychologie du temps¹⁹ had a direct influence on the choices made by Roger Reynolds during the early stages of composing The Angel of Death. [Cf. Proportionality and Form]. There was a growing perception that neither analytical procedure nor the philosophical approach could give an accurate account of all the many aspects of form. Today, it is with a mixture of fascination and apprehension that composers and musicologists alike watch psychologists conduct research on musical works drawn from the contemporary repertoire.

Nevertheless, resistance to such ideas remains. Certain musicologists in Europe see questions asked by experimental psychology as being reductionist. These questions cannot reach the heart of the work, nor can they change the problem in any fundamental way. At best all they do is crash through open gates. This point of view would seem to stem from the bygone days in which the experimental tools of psychological research consisted of nothing more than simple stimuli. It is no longer in tune with what is happening today. Fortunately, thinking evolves, and composers occasionally collaborate with research psychology. More than any other question, that of form can generate mistrust, because the experimental approach is apt to seriously upset traditional formal analytic methods, by uncovering something very different from the usual projections of form onto a spatial representation.

The second point of resistance comes from a deep-seated fear rarely expressed by composers but nevertheless very real: what if the experiment shows that a work has fallen way short of the composer's stated ambitions? This situation is all the more embarrassing if the composer, prior to the experiment, has written at length and with great certainty as to his or her intentions, perhaps even including instructions as to how the listener should listen to the music. Today's composers tend to be careful about making incautious statements. Even though they pay closer attention to the reactions of their public than they did in the past, they are nevertheless not particularly enthusiastic about submitting their compositions to the prying eye of research psychology. Their caution is understandable: at the best of times the concert premier of a new composition can be difficult, and it is clear that no composer wants the additional pressure that would stem from a composition being a research subject. Nevertheless, research will be a necessary step if any knowledge is to be gained about form as a time based real-life experience, and if the needed connections are to be established between analysis and perception.

We know that there are composers, who having greater familiarity with research and its methods, have understood the need for, and the benefit from new approaches. But it is one thing to be attentive to the advances made in research psychology and another to agree to a fully-fledged collaboration. Roger Reynolds took this courageous step when composing The Angel of Death. It is possible that this experiment will usher in a new era.

What do we mean when we talk about form in The Angel of Death? Are we talking about the form as the composer conceived it? Are we referring to the form as it is crystallized in the score? Are we talking about the "updated" form as it emerges during the initial rehearsals of the work, or perhaps the form perceived by the listeners during the concert? All these aspects enter into consideration when it comes to form. Let us examine them briefly.

The form of a work as conceived by the composer can only be accessible to musicologists if the composer has had something to say about it or has left documentary traces concerning it. In the case of the composition by Reynolds, the composition process was documented in detail, making it possible to understand the various stages of its realization. This was made possible by the fact that the composer maintained a diary, in which he carefully noted conversations and dialogue with the scientific collaborators, as well as the various versions of the overall plan of the piece. There are two ways to perform the composition (Sectional-Domain or Domain-Sectional ) this being one of the special aspects of the overall form of The Angel of Death. Right from the conception onwards, this approach drove the composer to look for original solutions.

The "crystallized form" is born out of analysis of the score, not from listening. This is the traditional analytical musicologist's terrain of activity. The formal schemas and diagrams of the textures made by the composer offer a representation that lies outside the time of the work, showing on paper events that normally take place in time. The numerical series chosen by Reynolds and then applied to duration values and proportions, originally also lie outside time, as do the pitch and combinatorial series. Generally speaking, the formal schema of an entire piece is indeed a necessary step in analysis, but one that necessarily gives a flat and frozen image. It cannot bring out the work's dynamic aspects.

The "updated" form is the one that the composer discovers when the work is played in its entirety for the first time, without the public. This is the moment when the work achieves existence. This stage can only be studied if the composer leaves documentary traces of it: modifications, touchups and various adjustments that may be visible on the score, and accounts left by musicians and by the conductor. If the composer is very experienced, he will have firm and precise control over the way the end result will sound. In The Angel of Death, only minimal adjustments appear to have been required. Modifications can be much more extensive if the composer is less experienced, or where he is using new techniques. There is nothing derogatory or arrogant in speaking of the degree of control that a composer may have over his writing. The relationship between the written and the sounding version of some contemporary works is so complex that problems can easily arise.

Finally, the form perceived by the listener is a matter for research psychology. In the present case, the investigations are centered on the human subject doing the perceiving. The work is so to speak temporarily taken over by the researcher for his own ends. Moving from one kind of form to another may show the work in a stronger or weaker light. This will only be apparent to someone who knows the piece perfectly well, notably the composer. As far as the listeners are concerned, the perceived form is the true work, the only form to which they have access unless they know how to read a score. To the listener, it does not appear to be a weakened or degraded form.

The conceived form of the work does not remain in a state of abstraction, but is spatialized by the composer, using explicit diagrams for the purpose of revealing the spatial architecture of the piece. The framework is highly apparent in the Sectional part (designated by the letter S), which is more spread out than the Domain part (designated by the letter D). The structure rests on five main columns: the five " themes".

A hasty and superficial reading of this diagram could give the impression that Roger Reynolds, by placing space and duration on the same plane, has made the mistake so often pointed up by Bergson. It could also lead to the conclusion that The Angel of Death slips into the reckless forms that so exasperate Pierre Boulez. This would be a false impression. Neither does the composer fall into the temptation of going back to the grand dramatic curve that Stockhausen had already abandoned in his Momentform. Looking carefully at the work, we see that it has no regressive aspects. It is laid out in a way that respects experimental protocol: the piano and the instrumental ensemble reverse their roles and share the thematic material in both S and D, making it possible to perform either an S-D or D-S version. Although certain discursive elements are retained in the work (confirmed by the presence of a closing epilogue) it is clear that this is no simple linear discourse, but genuine stratified writing.

The piano part and instrumental ensemble part constitute two layers, with the electroacoustic part being the third layer. It is an image of the angel of death, who in both versions, appears to spring out of infinity and then slowly slide down over the entire second half of the work, thus symbolically going through the two preceding layers as shown in the following schema.

Although this third layer has been conceived from a common material base, it has been subjected to various processes. Its ghostlike arrival in the second half has a powerful effect on the atmosphere of the piece [Cf. Drama and temporality of the electroacoustics in Roger Reynolds' The Angel of Death] and generates a complex situation, the perceptual effects of which are difficult to measure. [Cf. Influences of large-scale form on continuous rating in response to a contemporary piece in a live concert setting].

Superimposing of the layers is a rather more subtle matter when further sublayers are created inside one of the original layers. This brings about an intensification process that is encountered several times in the work. Let us examine two specific cases in detail.

The section that follows Other in the Domain part includes a piano layer divided further into two sublayers. The upper layer contains extensions drawn from the subsections of Theme 4 (T4.1, T4.2, T4.3, T4.4), whereas the lower layer plays, one after the other, stretched out subsections drawn from Theme 2 (T2.6, T2.7). These two layers provide the means of transition from Theme 2 up until the exposition of the core element of Theme 4. The orchestral layer is also divided into two sublayers that combine elements drawn from the subsections of Themes 3 and 5. However, the borders between the subsections of the piano and the orchestral layers are never simultaneous, with the exception of the end of T3.4 (ensemble) and that of T4.2 (piano).

The upper sublayer of the layer played by the ensemble exposes T3.1, T3.2, T3.3 and T3.4 over the lower sublayer which unfolds the subsections T5.1, T5.2, T5.3 et T5.6-7. Therefore, it is to these four sublayers that the electroacoustic part²⁰ is added, itself being divided into two sublayers (D2 and S11), [Cf. Drama and temporality of the electroacoustics in Roger Reynolds' The Angel of Death] with D2 carrying over into the entry of S11. From the end of bar 226 until the start of bar 241, the listener is faced with six real layers.

Although analysis can show up the stratified organization and the layouts of the elements that make up the original subsections, it can neither convey the effect produced nor predict the salience of these elements. While it is possible to perceive the double transition/combination aspect when reading the score²¹, a strict analysis cannot grasp all of the implications of the role this zone will have when experienced in the sounded form by the listener. The resemblance/familiarity rating is lower than that of the preceding Other section, which stands out sharply. However the results [Cf. Influences of large-scale form on continuous rating in response to a contemporary piece in a live concert setting], which vary between 50% and 60%, show that the listeners' attention remains undiminished, and that the stratification does not destroy the feeling of the flow of time that we would expect in a transitional passage. When the instrumental ensemble falls silent at bar 272 D, the piano and the electronic parts begin to move, at first gently and then with increasing force, towards the eruptive Theme 4, Jagged Rips. The in-concert recognition tests show that the core element of Theme 4 is well identified, and the composer rightly insists on the force with which this core makes its entry in the Domain part at bar 297. [Cf. Realization (thoughts are rehearsal proceeded)]

A similar intensification process can be seen in another section of the Domain part. But this time the stratification takes place in the territory of Theme 5, Interior Line. The piano sublayer exposes the subsections that are derived from Theme 5 (T5.1, T5.4) up to the point where the core element enters. The orchestral layer is comprised of three sublayers derived from Theme 1 (T1.4, T1.5, T1.7, T1.6), from Theme 2 (T2.2, T2.3, T2.5, T2.7) and from Theme 3 (T3.1, T3.2, T3.3, T3.4). If the Domain part is performed in the second half of the piece, an electroacoustic sublayer (D9), [Cf. Drama and temporality of the electroacoustics in Roger Reynolds' The Angel of Death] as in the preceding example, is brought in to enrich the texture.

On the resemblance/familiarity scale, this Domain thematic section is comparable to the one described above in the transition. Despite the simultaneous play of the sublayers and the complexity of the layout, the listeners did not get lost. The saturation point was not reached. The stratification process is an effective tool against an oversimplified, static vision of the form, but we can still wonder whether much of these sections remain in memory, and how they manage to acquire meaning when they are swallowed up by the sound flow over very long time periods. The crucial problem of selective memory "over time" is a long way from being resolved.

We will not deal here with directionality on the local scale, arising out of very obvious figures that go up or come down, that converge or diverge, that animates the local textures. Rather we would like to consider whether directionality takes place at the level of one of the large sections of the work or even on the scale of the work in its entirety. Contrary to tonal/metrical music, which tends to move in well-defined directions, atonal music explores other ways of dealing with time. This does not mean the total disappearance of the discursive type: it just means that it can be transferred to other dimensions and parameters, but ones that are much more difficult for the composer to control. For example, timbre can explode a monolithic structure and create associations very different from those that were intended. At other times, by contrast, a melodic structure, chopped up in a Klangfarbenmelodie process, may keep some of its linear attributes, and be perceived as a single melodic line. Where Reynolds does maintain a discursive character, he always does so without resorting to facile techniques or overemphasis. Theme 3, for example, does display a certain unidirectional quantity, but it ends in a suspended subsection that is infinitely more discret than a tonal half cadence [Cf. Thematic Materials from The Angel of Death and The Angel of Death: Timelessness of the pianistic gesture].

On a larger scale, directionality can remain suspended, thus avoiding any hint of a dramatic curve over the entire work. This is precisely the function of Other. This section is not a theme. It is there to break the great virtual curve and hinder the deployment of The Angel of Death, by imposing a state of immobility that is nevertheless animated by unpredictable inner activity. This makes the succeeding transition all the more palpable as movement, without however making it possible to predict what section the listener will perceive as being the endpoint of this movement: perhaps the entry of Theme 4? Possibly so. But in the Domain part, with its stratified writing and its fuzzy boundaries, the entire movement could very well be seen as leading up, in a single jump, to the big structural 9-second silence that follows Theme 4, in spite of the ease with which the core element is identified. The soaring movement is not interrupted by the theme which carries the listener all the way to the silence, a silence that, in the big picture, is fully justified. Any dynamic conception of form must take this kind of subtle detail into account.

In the perception of the composition on a large scale, the structural silences are there to provide the necessary formal "breathing". For there is indeed such a thing as formal breathing, without which the listener would suffer from a feeling of suffocation. Apart from any considerations concerning the numerical speculation upon which the composer built The Angel of Death, those structural silences appear at the right moment, i.e. just when the listener feels the need for an interruption in the flow, proof of a high degree of sensitivity on the composer's part. What actually takes place during those moments of silence? There is no precise answer to that question. It must be assumed that they afford a brief moment for the nerves to recover, always a welcome thing for listeners exposed to a new language. As for cerebral activity, whether of a summing up or an anticipatory nature, although it may decrease in intensity, it does not stop: the cognitive activities that take place during these brief moments of respite may contribute considerably to building up a mental representation of the piece.

Let us return to the lengthy Theme 5. Its place at the end of this section means it has a special role. Even in its most circumscribed form in Sections, along with the electronic part, it has to allow the bounce-back that occurs when moving to the second major segment in the SD version. It possesses linearity, but this is slightly clouded, or thickened. It becomes less affirmative, dreamy even, and opens the way to a new path. In the D-S version, it signals the finish of the global form by means of a feeling of serenity, without however totally shutting down the piece, a role that specifically belongs to the Epilog. This double formal functionality, which depends upon the chosen performance order for the piece, is obvious enough to the eye of the analyst looking at the general plan drawn up by the composer. But for the listener, plunged into a river of sound, it can only become apparent with hindsight, and it is unlikely that its full impact could be perceived during the first couple of listenings. Only the persevering listener will hear it. Thus this zone possesses only a moderate sense of direction when compared with the strong sense of direction in the TR2->4 transition. On the large scale, the form of the piece is shaped by the more outstanding events: the sections that possess a strong sense of direction, the thematic subsections -- but not always the core element -- the stasis or static parts (which have no sense of direction) and finally the structural silences.

It is interesting to note that in spite of the detailed and multidisciplinary explorations to which the work has been subjected, it has nevertheless kept some of its secrets. We are a long way from having exhausted the meaning that it contains. This is not a bad thing, on the contrary, and is typical of a work of value.

The verbal accounts that were obtained during the thematic subsection classification experiments [Cf. Perception of musical similarity among contemporary thematic materials in two instrumentations]show clearly that The Angel of Death generated very characteristic emotional states in the listeners. We are not going to speculate about the basic character of any emotion, or compare it to some other emotion supposed to be more refined or less refined, and we are not going to make value judgements concerning the quality of those emotions. The first important point is that the extracts in question do indeed provoke the emotions concerned, and are not perceived as an avalanche of sound signals met with nothing but indifference.

The second point arises directly out of the question of that emotional power: the succession of the emotional states, as well as their variations to a certain extent, contribute to the understanding of the smaller forms created by the themes. The high salience of the surface features may bring about some confusion notably in the orchestral version (artificial regroupings of materials, or separate classing of materials with commonalities). Nevertheless, on the small and medium scale, there is a fair degree of convergence between what the composer intended and what the listeners heard.

What is the situation when we come to the question of the large-scale form? Firstly we must distinguish between real-time first listenings, as against repeated ones. Listening for the first time to a work like The Angel of Death means that the listener has to create an inner image of the form "on the fly", based on criteria of similarity and difference, in which surface elements play a large part. Even if the cases of confusion mentioned above occur on a large scale (memory only operates on events far apart in time if they possess sufficiently distinctive characteristics to work themselves into an elementary representation), the succession of emotional states generated by the more salient events can nevertheless bring about the perception of a rudimentary form. Although some of the transformations undergone by the material may not be noticed by the listeners, this does not prevent them from understanding something of the formal structure: enough information remains in order for them to experience a feeling of expectation. The return of emotional states that have already been experienced make it temporarily possible to grasp the deeper nature of the material in question, even though there may be some errors in identifying or interpreting it.²² There still remains the feeling of a process at work.

The real-time experiments conducted during the listening to the piece provide valuable information concerning listeners' instantaneous reactions. The data tend to show that listeners perceive the major articulations of the form in a way similar to that intended by the composer, and at precisely the right moments, suggesting that memorization is not at play. [Cf. Fig. 5]. Dynamic form is a time-based experience fed by change and its emotional effects.

To consider form from the existential standpoint is to ask the only question that really interests the listener: what remains of what I heard and do I want to repeat the experience? The answer is vital to the composer because it decides the future of his composition. Reports of vague sensations, agreeable or otherwise, would be insufficient. However there remains the difficult task of knowing what elements survive in the listener's memory, enabling him or her to form a mental representation. Time wears down what we remember. There is also a saturation phenomenon, and it inevitably makes us forget certain things or confuse them with others: it is vain to hope that some kind of uninterrupted continuous inner image will remain in the listener's memory. There must inevitably be gaps and undue overlapping. The listener may even confuse medium sized structures with each other, if the structures in question contained enough musical meaning in their own right. In other words when listening to a work for the first time, what is important is not the analytical understanding of the overall form, but a minimal representation based mainly on surface features, which the listeners may or may not remember in their correct order, but from which they will nevertheless build up a succession of emotional states, believing that these were intended by the composer. In the strictest sense of the word, the listener is generating a protoform.

There is nothing surprising in such divergences between the initial inner image in the listener's mind and what the composer actually intended providing that they remain within reasonable limits for the composer (i.e. that the listeners more or less "understand" what the work was about). What also matters is that the listener finds the musical events interesting and wants to carry on listening. Any threshold of tolerable error will take into account the total duration of the work as well as the density of the material it contains. On the time scale of the entire work, it is not unreasonable that medium-sized sections get switched around in the listener's mind.

To believe that an aleatoric assemblage of the sections, without regard for their sense of direction in time, will produce the same effect as the composition proper, is to deny the existence of form. This possibility is what haunts composers today. It is the subject of lively debate between musicologists and psychologists. Even tonal music is coming under the microscope. It seems to us that the final result of such a scenario -- and we say it with a shudder -- can have as its only possible result the artistically unacceptable situation in which the listener ends up liking an aleatoric order more than the work itself. Nevertheless from a scientific point of view, the question remains posed. What would be the meaning of such a result? It would show the impact of the initial listening and the role of memory in making up the protoform. The faulty version would be the one that establishes itself in the virgin territory of the listener's ear, the one to which he or she would remain captive.

Faced with this musicologist's nightmare, one could retort that The Angel of Death is a composition entirely controlled by the composer, not a work of variable geometry, and that therefore there is no reason why such a situation might arise in an artistic context. In the case of the Reynolds piece, this kind of manipulation was not attempted. Therefore we can confine our remarks to the actual results, and applaud the listeners for having turned in a very creditable performance, in view of the length and the richness of the composition. From our point of view, the work achieved its goal, even though the composer might feel somewhat disappointed that listeners experienced difficulty in recognizing transformed material on the local scale. [Cf. Effects of instrumentation change on the recognition of musical materials and Implicit memory relations between original and transformed version of contemporary musical materials]

Starting out from the protoform, the listener could move towards a representation that would be closer to what the composer might legitimately hope for. The gap between the protoform and a more elaborate representation of the work will be partly filled in by means of repeated listenings. However it could not reach a state of total precision: that idea belongs better in the world of fantasy, and is not part of the reality of listening. It would also be a perilous exercise to predict how many listenings are necessary in order to obtain an acceptable result, especially when dealing with a piece of contemporary music that is as long as The Angel of Death. One interesting experimental avenue would be to observe how the protoform evolves from one listening to the next, and the critical point at which it stops evolving. Naturally a program of this kind would meet with considerable material difficulty: it would require an enormous effort from listeners because of the length of the work, and the time required for each listening. Further, the experimental protocol would demand extreme ingenuity from the psychologists, although it would not be impossible.

In view of the richness of the results obtained in real-time and in the laboratory, we believe that it would now be possible to identify the traces left in listeners' memories after each listening. We could also examine how the abstract representation of the form evolves between listenings, on the scale of a single section (Sectional for example). A Sectional-Epilog performance would already constitute a very large chunk, the duration of which would pose psychological problems in its own right. However, if we are genuinely seeking to respect the wishes of the composer, then we must aim for the entire work: the Epilog only takes on its full meaning when seen in the context of the performance of the entire piece (Sectional-Domain or vice versa). Admittedly, at the final stage when the listener has had the chance to hear the composition a large number of times, it is obvious that the object received cannot be compared to the object generated by analysis of the score. There must be some differences from what the composer intended. Clearly it is the perceived object that will decide the destiny of the work, and composers of today are becoming aware of what is at stake.

So it must be understood that the term "protoform"²³ as used in the present text carries absolutely no pejorative connotations whatsoever, and one should retain the sense "first" and "being formed" of this term. If a work cannot generate a protoform, the listener will lose interest very rapidly. In the strictest sense of the word, the composition remains "formless" for the listener, in spite of the composer's intentions. It is highly unlikely that the listener will want to hear it a second time, even though recordings make that easy. Temporarily, such a situation would be considered as a failure.²⁴ As stated earlier, this is certainly not the case with The Angel of Death.

If the dynamic aspects of form are accessible via the techniques of research psychology and not those of musical analysis, it is safe to predict that the two disciplines are going to get along much better. Musical analysis, which is strongly influenced by the structuralist point of view, strives to uncover what is hidden, what cannot be seen by simply reading the score: the deep-level structures, the relationships between elements that are far apart, and the way pitch and duration are organized. In addition to this, there are the dimensions of timbre and space, very important in today's music. As if this were not enough, there is also the delicate and difficult study of the relationships between the global and the local organization of the work. This already amounts to quite a lot. At what point, then, should experimental data be injected into the equation?

And there is another even more pressing question: which aspects among the mass of experimental information should be taken into account? Those that confirm the analytical approach, leaving aside the elements that contradict it? Or should the data generated by the listenings be used to create a third type of object, which would be neither the initial protoform nor the analysis resulting from scrutiny of the score? It seems reasonable enough to want to make a detailed comparison of the data obtained from both approaches. Another way forward might be to invent analytical tools more suited to listening as a perceptual phenomenon.

With this in mind, the debate could take a new direction. It is going to be necessary to grant some kind of legitimacy to what is currently termed the perceptual error and to redefine the relationship between surface and deep-level structures. Deep-level structures are very real to the composer: he knows the conscious processes by which he created them while composing the work. The analyst also perceives them as being real, but the two realities are not exactly the same: it is well known that the analysts may discover unconscious but nevertheless very real processes and structures. It can also happen that the analyst leaves aside the processes used by the composer and nevertheless still produces a coherent analysis: the goal of analysis is not to reconstitute those procedures, procedures that in some contemporary works cannot be identified without the composer's help. Under conditions like these, there is no reason why the mental representation of a work derived solely from direct perception should not be treated with equal seriousness, even though it may be debatable or erroneous in parts.

This ought to push us on to ask ourselves searching questions about the nature of the surface features: are they so superficial after all? In today's art music, they appear to be taking on the attributes of regularity and functionality once held by the now dead tonal languages: could it be that instrumental gestures and sound textures are in the process of diving below the surface and occupying more solid ground? The final sonic result that comes out of the writing seems to be acquiring greater importance in the way it is structured and applied than the abstract principles that initially governed the writing. The dry task of identifying underlying materials still has a role to play, but is being overtaken by the highly charged global tones, which even when they are only approximately reconstituted in the mind, serve to organize the protoform. We are not putting forward here the provocative idea of a complete inversion between deep-level and surface structures, but the somewhat more practicable notion of restoring balance in favor of the perceptual approach. In the end, when it comes to the difficult question of understanding musical form, the analytical approach and the perceptual approach turn out to be both indispensable. They can only be made to work together if the people who are responsible for them take care not to confuse them, nor overestimate their respective importance.

The inclusion of the act of listening is a necessary precondition for any dynamic conception of form demanding a multidimensional image, one that possesses relief. In addition it must be able to represent any speeding up and slowing down in the stream of sound, able to depict the simultaneity of events, as well as static episodes. Although making a distinction between deep-level structures and surface events might be pertinent in analysis, this is less true in the framework of a perceptual approach to contemporary compositions. In the latter context sound structures considered as belonging to the "surface” tend in fact to make up the very substance of the listening experience, and play a fundamental part in organizing the protoform. The research that was carried out in collaboration with the composer of The Angel of Death shows us that the realities pertaining to the experience of the first listening, as well as succeeding listenings which help the protoform evolve, are central problems that concern scientists, psychologists and musicologists alike. But it is above all composers who should be able to benefit from such advances in research, and become aware of the possibilities contained in the listening faculty, so as to make use of them, or even transgress them if they so desire. This freedom has always been theirs, but from now on they will be able to exercise it in full possession of the facts.