Worth noting: Roger Reynolds's Form and Method.(Book Review)

Publication: Perspectives of New Music

Publication Date: 01-JAN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Washington

Rather than being suddenly revealed, whole, a musical work is achieved gradually over time in a manner that doubtless varies for each composer: part discovery, part construction, even, admittedly, part contrivance (and, if the poet John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is to be believed, also part sheer undirected bumbling). But, in most cases, there is a necessary (though by no means uniform) staging involved in the process of completing a musical composition. We can thus inquire into the process recognizing it as a multileveled search for ultimate integration rather than the unrolling of a scroll upon which has been inscribed an already, mystically completed continuity that one only needs to receive.

Roger Reynolds

REYNOLD'S BOOK is sectioned into a Part I containing an essay on Form (pp. 1-42),...

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