The Creation of Audible Time

L. Rowell

A chapter in The Study of Time IV, 1981, pp 198-210 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract John Cage once remarked about David Tudor, “His music has no beginning, no middle, and no end.”1 What Cage meant by this cryptic comment was that Tudor’s music studiously avoids the conventional rhetoric—the various opening and closing gambits, tactics, and behaviors that audiences have come to expect in different genres and styles of music. This “conventional rhetoric” is the subject of the present paper. Our method is an exploration of how musical compositions begin: what it takes to transport the listener from the external world of clock time to the internal time which a piece of music creates and which is shared by composer, performer, and listener. And how—by means of specific actions, energy, duration, speed of pulsation, patterning, and a variety of other clues—we are brought under the control of an audible, hierarchical time that is more palpable, more insistent, more clearly articulated, and more flexible than the world of everyday time to which we eventually return.

Keywords: Internal Time; Musical Composition; Musical Structure; Western Music; Musical Process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1981
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-1-4612-5947-3_16

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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4612-5947-3_16

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