ABSTRACT
This study focuses on listeners’ form perception as they encounter Western concert music. The general aim was to investigate college music students’ form perception as they listen to five long-range concert works of different styles, all analyzed by the author as having an overall ternary ABA’ arch-form. Five groups of college music students (N=126) listened respectively to five ternary arch-form compositions by Chopin, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Bartók and Schönberg. Each group was required to identify the musical form of one test-piece and convey responses both through written notes and self-invented notations. Significant differences were found between the five test-pieces in the percentage of participants who confirmed the ternary form analysis and participants who interpreted the form as binary. Also, significant differences were found in (i) five cue-parameters contributing to form detection: tempo, timbre, pitch, articulation and mood; (ii) in emotional and metaphoric responses evoked by the music; and (iii) in the use of colour in visual representations of musical form. A significant association between auditory/ternary perception and graphic/ternary designs was found in works by Chopin, Mussorgsky and Bartók. Results bear implications for the teaching and learning of structural listening in Western concert music.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Rivka Elkoshi is a pianist, senior lecturer of music at Levinsky College in Tel-Aviv, Israel and supervisor of doctoral dissertations at Bar Ilan University, Ramt Gan, Israel. She has taught music at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and conducted workshops for music educators on behalf of the Education Ministry in Israel. Her specialty is research on music perception and musical literacy, piano pedagogy and the Orff method. She is a recipient of an Institutional Fellowship for her research on children’s musical perception. She has served as manager at the Israeli Musicology society and presented internationally in a number of different countries. Her publications include piano compositions, a number of books on piano and Orff pedagogy (in Hebrew), and book chapters and articles on music perception and musical literacy in international British and American journals.
Notes
8 Ashley Citation2017; Bent Citation2001; La Rue Citation1970; Prout Citation1893.
Prout (Citation1893), for example, proceeds (in the first volume) from the small scale 'motif' to ‘phrase’ and ‘sentence’, and then to larger-scale 'binary' and 'ternary' forms. La Rue’s (Citation1970) Guidelines for Style Analysis is an example of category analysis, a method of breaking down the complex musical work into elements.
9 Marx's (Citation1856) notion of the motive as a tiny unit of two or more notes, which serves as the 'seed' or 'sprout' of the phrase out of which it grows; Schenker's 'Saat-Ernte' metaphor 'from seed to harvest' (Drabkin Citation2002:821; Babbitt Citation1952); Reti's view of formal construction is based on the evolutionary growth of a motif; thematic material of large-scale works is reduced to a series of ‘prime cell’ (Cooke Citation1967). The 'tree' metaphor and terms like 'thematic grain', ‘melodic kernel’ or 'roots' (vertical chords that form units, named by their fundamental notes), indicate the notion of the hierarchical organism in music. Reduction in Lerdahl and Jackendoff (Citation1983) GTTM was shown as branching trees above the staff.
11 Gestalt theoretical concepts and related research focused primarily on visual experiences; objects that are in close proximity to each other, and/or similar in shape or color tend to be perceived as a group. The perceiving mind seeks the simplest available grouping, and looks for repetition, symmetry and equal separation (Köhler Citation1929; Wertheimer Citation1958; Koffka Citation1935).
15 For example, the eighteenth-century German music theorist Joseph Riepel (1709–1782) used graphic devises, such as squares, crosses, and letters in his theory of form (Knouse Citation1986); The German musicologist Gustav Wilhelm Becking (1894–1945) devised a set of graphic curves, so-called 'Becking curves', for representing a theory that combines rhythmic patterns with physical movement; Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) devised the Fünf Urlinie-Tafeln (1932); a self-sufficient graphing of works by Bach, Haydn, and Chopin. In addition to note values, the Urlinie-Tafeln employ sophisticated graphic devices, like note-heads printed large to indicate structural importance, beaming together of structural notes, dotted curves to indicate longer-term structural retention of particular pitches, horizontal and sloping square brackets to show the movement of the fundamental line, curved lines to indicate important progressions and many other auxiliary symbols (Bent Citation2001; Forte Citation1959).
19 The American painter Paul Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), known for his ‘action paintings drip technique’ of splashing paint on canvas.
20 For example, Mozart's piano sonata K. 282 first Mov is analyzed as either a binary two-part form or a sonata-allegro form (Krumhansl Citation1996; Hepokoski and Darcy Citation2006).
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