Abstract

According to [Edward T.] Cone, then, there is a great deal of music written today that is simply no longer susceptible to analysis. If this is true, it can mean one of several things. First, it may indicate that, although there are new compositions that one finds interesting and representative of the period in which we live, the music simply does not lend itself to analysis. Thus, even if we enjoy and admire this music, there is not much that we can say about it beyond perhaps a mere description—which I think most of us, along with Cone, would agree does not really constitute an analysis. I have the impression that many proponents of new music hold this view—that is, they feel that new music is understandable only through a sort of mindless apprehension of its sensory surface. But if this is a fair account of the situation surrounding new music, it seems to me to represent a very serious—and also depressing—state of affairs. For what it means, I suspect, is that new music does not lend itself to being thought about in any serious way at all; and if so, then new music is missing a crucial dimension—namely, an accompanying conceptual framework, erected through a body of critical and theoretical discourse, through which its meaning is defined and redefined as our thinking about music evolves. Indeed, this dimension forms—and has always formed—such an integral component of Western art music that its absence would seem to indicate that music, at least as we have known it, is in all likelihood dead. Robert P. Morgan is professor of music theory and composition at Temple University. In addition to being a composer, he is active as a critic; his articles on contemporary music have appeared recently in several music journals and in An Ives Celebration. His contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Musical Time/Musical Space" appeared in the Spring 1980 issue