The composer conceived the musical form of The Angel of Death as a plan inhabited by strata and temporal regions that defined parallelisms of various kinds. The plan evolved as composition began and musical necessities arose that were in conflict with the plan as it had been originally conceived. Changes affected relative temporal proportions, the presence or absence of certain proposed regions, the degree of coexistence of various kinds of materials, and so on. And at times the changes involved not just formal adjustments, but also adjustments at the level of the musical content, including minor modifications of the basic thematic materials. The composer's focus on musical form as a many-leveled and multidimensional temporal experience was omnipresent in the development of the metric and spatial parallelism of the S and D parts. The D part was composed second and was deliberately constrained to fit on score pages with bar structures that were identical to those of the already completed S part. The many components that needed to be entertained simultaneously led to changes in the nature of some regions in response to the balancing of weight, extent, flow, and dramatic trajectory from one region to another. These often concerned how the impact of an already heard region would weigh in memory as it interacted with another region being heard at a later moment. The Composition Stream laid out with remarkable clarity the decision-making and problem-solving processes that entered into the fashioning of musical details within the larger structural plan in order that they give rise to a desired experience through time and memory.
The Analysis Stream discussed how a perceptual approach, so often lacking in music analytic work to date, is essential to an understanding of the dynamic aspects of form. It goes so far as to emphasize the error of conceiving musical form as experienced in terms of spatial layouts on paper (although such representations are still quite useful for consideration of the conception of a form and the understanding of relations within the form from an analytic point of view, as several aspects of this project have demonstrated quite clearly). The resistance to this more dynamic conception of form in analytic circles, and in particular to its close tie with the methods of experimental psychology, is often related to a skepticism concerning the reductionist nature of some music psychology. While spatial reasoning on form may be intimately tied to the endemic use of spatial metaphor in much human reasoning, one might still question what role such metaphors actually play in how one listens to and commits form to memory during actual musical experience.
The Perception Stream presented a unique study in which listeners at the world premier in Paris and the North American premier in La Jolla, California made continuous ratings concerning aspects of their ongoing musical experience with the piece in performance. The starting point for the studies was that large-scale form, from a psychological perspective, comprises the shape of experience through time, with its resonating reminiscences. This led to an approach that emphasized the role of cognitive dynamics as they related to perception, attention, and memory processes during listening, as well as to the interactions of these factors. The shape of these aspects of experience is characterized by their response profiles over time. Effects of large-scale form can be gleaned from a study of these profiles across the two versions of the piece. Profiles capturing ratings of the resemblance of what is being heard to anything heard in the piece up to that point show that this scale captures perception of sectional relations rather than those among melodic-rhythmic configurations on a smaller time scale. Changes in ratings are very prominent at section boundaries and analyses show the boundary strengths to be different between the S and D parts of the piece. The strength of boundaries also changes depending on whether S or D occurs first and upon the first ordering heard in the concert (S-D vs. D-S, both versions being played at the premier concerts). S boundaries, as predicted by the composer, were more salient than those in D, but more interestingly S boundaries were stronger after having heard D, whereas D boundaries were less salient after having heard S. This result shows for the first time an influence of large-scale form on instantaneous response to the music and provides perceptual data that may explain why listeners generally preferred the D-S to the S-D version of the piece. The emotional force scale showed the strong effects of the computer solos and the derived regions (TR2 to 4, COMB2/4). The profiles generally revealed a rather varied emotional landscape over the course of the piece, a landscape that could be conceived of as a series of nested arches with increasing and decreasing emotional impact. This structure is different in many places from the perceived sectional structure defined by the familiarity/resemblance scale and points to a complex interplay of cognitive and affective forces in the experience of time over the course of a musical form.
From this point, the Composition Stream will reflect on the composer's reaction to certain aspects of the piece upon hearing it in rehearsal and then subsequent to hearing it in the two premiers. The Analysis Stream will provide a retrospective reflection on the place of analysis in the Angel Project as a whole.