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Oxford University Press The Musical Quarterly
Oxford University Press The Musical Quarterly
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to The Musical Quarterly
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MOMENT FORM IN TWENTIETH
CENTURY MUSIC
By JONATHAN D. KRAMER
Part of the research for this article was done at the School of Criticism and Theory,
University of California at Irvine, 1976, under a grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities. This essay is extracted from a book-length study entitled
Stravinsky and Darmstadt: a Study of Musical Time.
1 Leonard B. Meyer, "Meaning in Music and Information Theory," Music, the
Arts, and Ideas (Chicago, 1967), pp. 5-21.
2sJonathan D. Kramer, "Multiple and Non-Linear Time in Beethoven's Opus
135," Perspectives of New Music, XI/2 (Spring-Summer, 1973), 122-45.
177
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178 The Musical Quarterly
3 Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos (New York, 1967), pp. 25-40.
4 Kramer, "Multiple and Non-Linear Time in Beethoven's Opus 135," pp. 132-41.
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Moment Form 179
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180 The Musical Quarterly
For me, every attempt to bring a work to a close after a certain time becomes
more and more forced and ridiculous. I am looking for ways of renouncing the
composition of single works and - if possible - of working only forwards, and
of working so "openly" that everything can now be included in the task in hand,
at once transforming and being transformed by it; and the questing of others
for autonomous works just seems to me so much clamour and vapour.9
8 Texte I, p. 207, trans. Heikinheimo, pp. 121-22. Heikinheimo retains the original
Anfang, Beginn, Ende, and Schluss for which I have substituted respectively "begin-
ning," "starting," "ending," and "stopping."
9 Quoted in Karl H. W6rner, Stockhausen: Life and Work, trans. Bill Hopkins
(Berkeley, 1973), pp. 110-11.
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Moment Form 181
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182 The Musical Quarterly
13 Heikifnheimo, p. 192.
14 Kramer, "The Fibonacci Series in Twentieth Century Music," Journal of Music
Theory, XVII/1 (Spring, 1973), 114-18.
15 Ibid., pp. 125-26.
16 Maconie, p. 207.
17 Kramer, "The Fibonacci Series," pp. 121-25.
18 Jonathan Harvey, The Music of Stockhausen: An Introduction (Berkeley, 1975),
p. 96.
19 Maconie, p. 263.
20 Kramer, "Multiple and Non-Linear Time in Beethoven's Opus 135," passim.
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Moment Form 183
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184 The Musical Quarterly
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Moment Form 185
Moments:
231 know of no psychological data that would determine what degree of approx
mation of a given duration proportion of moments is tolerable. There is, however
perhaps not irrelevant study by C. Douglas Creelman that demonstrates experiment
that a 10 percent or less deviation of duration in two compared sounds is not p
ceived. Creelman uses durations only up to 2 seconds; the shortest moment in Sym
phonies is 3.61 seconds. Possibly the 10 percent limit also applies to greater duratio
I have kept my approximations all well within this limit. See C. D. Creelman, "Hum
Discrimination of Auditory Duration," Journal of the Acoustical Society of Amer
XXXIV (1962), 582-93.
24 Durations, shown in seconds, are calculated from the first attack of a section
to the first attack of the next section. Stravinsky's metronome markings are the basis
of the calculations. The fermata value is averaged from several recordings. The decision
about what constitutes a moment, or its subdivision, a submoment, in this music was
made on the basis of degree of change in tempo, harmony, and melodic material,
with supporting data from timbre and texture. Only the first half of the piece is
analyzed here; the second half uses a different proportional system, less economical
and less elegant, but nonetheless appropriate to moment form.
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186 The Musical Quarterly
Submoments:
[0] - [1] 7.92
[1] -1[2] 12.92
[2] - [3] 5.21
[3] - [4] 3.54
[4] - [6] 20.00
[11]--[15] 26.11
[15] - [26] 53.89
[40] - [41] 8.61
[41] - [42] 7.49
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Moment Form 187
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188 The Musical Quarterly
thus complicate the music, but in fact they almost freeze the harmonies and thereby
simplify the situation. With harmonic direction no longer a prime factor, there is
actually less information. Similar additions are made to the originals (thought to be
by Pergolesi) in Pulcinella, Stravinsky's first neoclassic effort, composed just prior to
Symphonies.
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Moment Form 189
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190 The Musical Quarterly
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Moment Form 191
not cadence but rather drops away: an open ending, fully appropr
31 For a discussion of the dramatic curve in music and its demise in the twentieth
century, see Barney Childs, "Time and Music: a Composer's View," Perspectives
New Music, XV/2 (Spring-Summer, 1977).
32 For an interesting discussion of temporality in certain non-Western music,
Richard Saylor, "The South Asian Conception of Time and Its Influence on Con-
temporary Western Composition," a paper read to the American Society of University
Composers, Boston, Proceedings of the Annual Conferences, February 29, 1976.
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192 The Musical Quarterly
the agreement between the technical methods of the film and the
of the new concept of time is so complete that one has the feeling
categories of modern art have arisen from the spirit of cinematic f
is inclined to consider the film itself as the stylistically most repr
genre of contemporary art. .... In the temporal medium of a film
a way that is otherwise peculiar to space, completely free to choose
proceeding from one phase of time into another, just as one goes fr
to another, disconnecting the individual stages in the development
regrouping them, generally speaking, according to the principles of
In brief, time here loses, on the one hand, its irreversible direction. It can be
brought to a standstill: in close-ups; reversed: in flash-backs; repeated: in recol-
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Moment Form 193
The time experience of the present age consists above all in an awareness of the
moment in which we find ourselves: in an awareness of the present. Everything
topical, contemporary, bound together in the present moment is of special signi-
cance and value to the man of today, and, filled with this idea, the mere fact of
simultaneity acquires new meaning in his eyes. . ... Is one not in every moment
of one's life the same child or the same invalid or the same lonely stranger with
the same wakeful, sensitive, unappeased nerves? Is one not in every situation of
34 The Social History of Art, Vol. IV, trans. Stanley Godman (New York, 1958),
239, 241.
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194 The Musical Quarterly
life the person capable of experiencing this and that, who poss
ring features of his experience, the one protection against th
Do not all our experiences take place as it were at the same t
simultaneity not really the negation of time? And this negation,
for the recovery of that inwardness of which physical space and
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