Abstract
Irène Deliège, through her approach to Boulez and Berio, was the first person to tackle the problem of the perceptual organisation of contemporary music. In 1987, she published, with A. El Ahmadi, an experimental study of the real time perception of Sequenza VI for alto solo, which she resumed in the 1989 article “Approche perceptive de formes musicales contemporaines” (“A perceptual approach to contemporary musical forms”), and which she completed in similar work on Éclat by Boulez. These articles were groundbreaking and are fundamental to a large proportion of musical cognitive psychology today, pushing it beyond studying uniquely tonal music and the theoretical limitations that this brings with it. In addition, she uses a method that I myself introduced in 1981 (albeit on tonal pieces, an Intermezzo by Brahms and a Prelude for piano by Debussy, La Puerta del Vino), that I also resumed in 1987 in relation to Sequenza III. She was to extend this work through other experiments based on the same issue in relation to the First Sonata for solo violin by Bach (1996, 2007, Deliège & Mélen 1994) and the solo for cor anglais which follows the Prélude to the 3rd act of Tristan et Isolde by Wagner (1998, 2007).
I would therefore like to attempt here a comparison of our results in relation to the two Sequenze and demonstrate the great value of the model developed by Irène.
I thereby pay hommage to her pioneering work.
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