TIME-SPACE EXPERIENCE IN WORKS FOR SOLO CELLO BY LACHENMANN, XENAKIS AND FERNEYHOUGH: A PERFORMANCE-SENSITIVE APPROACH TO MORPHOSYNTACTIC MUSICAL ANALYSIS

The present article aims to develop an approach to musical meaning that integrates performative dimensions systematically into a broadened concept of analysis, connecting particularly to recent research into the temporal qualities of musical perception. Taking three key works from the solo cello repertoire of the 1960s and '70s - Helmut Lachenmann's Pression, Iannis Xenakis's Nomos Alpha and Brian Ferneyhough's Time and Motion Study II - as a basic corpus of study, this 'morphosyntactic' view of sound structure is complemented with a comparison of different recordings of these three works by interpreting software-based collections of data of timing and tempo as well as close listening, in addition to documentation of the composers' and performers' conceptions of time and tempo. The analyses propose an interaction of three different categories of form-building time-space concepts that are deeply embedded in the history of music theory and aesthetics: 'spatial time', 'processual time' and 'presentist time'. Performers may shift between or merge these three archetypes by varying temporal and dynamic consistency or contrast, among other means. The performance-related data are compared with the perspectives of performers and composers, corroborating the space of 'informed intuition' even in the performance of these very prescriptively notated scores and demonstrating on multiple levels the continuous impact of 'rhetorical' performance traditions (despite or within their compositional deconstruction) in the music of the postwar and contemporary avant-garde.