The Macroform in Post-Tonalmusic. Listening and Analysis

Abstract

Form in classical music is fundamentally a question of organising musical time in order to facilitate a listening corresponding to author's expectations. In the past this was obtained by coordinating different parameters towards a single goal. In twentieth century music, the more detached relationship between the composer and the listener meant that less importance was given to the idea of “correct” listening and to the coordination of parameters. This article is devoted to one of the extreme points in this process: A quartet by Bruno Maderna composed in 1956 under the influence of the ideologies of Darmstadt.

The quartet was examined by three different groups of analysts. The first group examined the score of the quartet, while the third group only had a recorded performance at its disposal; the second group analyzed both the score and the performance. The three groups had to describe the form of the piece in terms of three hierarchical levels: Its microform {i.e. the organisation of minimal units not divisible into smaller parts); its macroform (i.e. its division into the minimum possible number of parts); the medium form {i.e. a collection of minimal units that could also be interpreted as an acceptable division of the parts at a macroformal level). Two basic criteria were used: Segmentation (local parametric discontinuity between two adjacent parts) and similarity (coherence between the parameters within each part). The results of the three analyses were somewhat diverse, thus demonstrating the tendency to relax the sense of form in such a quartet, as well as the presence of different procedures used when listening to a performance and analysing a score.