Chapters
7.1.Implications on musical form
Apocalyptic Passacaglia... is the only conventional musical form amongst all works in this thesis. All other works are composed in forms that are generated in each case specifically for the musical material or for the literary text that is set. They are forms that are through-composed and can be seen as kinds of ‘musical narrative’. In some cases, as in the last movement of the Third Percussion Concerto (Example 30), there is a multitude of narratives that develop simultaneously in parallel imaginative dimensions, while the perspective given by the sounding aspect of the music alternates between these multiple narratives.
These kinds of musical forms very rarely feature any circularity/recapitulations. The only network of passages that are straightforward structural ‘returns’ (similar to the recapitulations of the Common Practice period), feature in The Mirror, where they reflect the idea of a ‘labyrinth’ in which the dramatic action takes place. The most important chain of such ‘labyrinth returns’ are settings of the text given in the motto to the Introduction to this text (Introduction).
With this case-specific approach to generation of musical form, there are three main structural devices which play a seminal role in the structuring of all these compositions: ‘morphing’ (Chapter 1.3), ‘cuts’ (Chapter 7) and ...‘windows being open and closed’ (Chapter 2.2)...
