Musical Composition
Conclusion
Musical compositions all have a common foundation—the acoustic and physiological realities of the human body. Composers combine these physical realities with an awareness of the sociocultural context and the emotional and aesthetic ramifications of patterns, acoustics, and language. The inability of defining such a complex process, a delicate balancing act between the physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual is at the heart of Frederic Rzewski's description of composition as seen by a composer: "Composition is a constant search for reproducible patterns in the sound-universe and for rational symbols to describe them. It is a mystery how deep unconscious processes can somehow be expressed in a symbolic form, which makes them comprehensible to other minds" (Lecture at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, 21 June 1994).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Berry, Wallace. Structural Functions in Music. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976.
Hindemith, Paul. The Craft of Musical Composition. Vol. 1. New York: Associated Music, 1945.
Kerman, Joseph. Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Kunst, Jos. Making Sense in Music: An Enquiry into the Formal Pragmatics of Art. Ghent, Belgium: Communication and Cognition XVI, 1978.
Shelemay, Kay Kaufman, ed. Ethnomusicology: History, Definition, and Scope. Garland, 1992.
Kathryn Pisaro
Additional topics
- Musical Composition - Bibliography
- Musical Composition - Changing Definitions
- Other Free Encyclopedias
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Cluster compound to ConcupiscenceMusical Composition - Cultural Roles, Changing Definitions, Conclusion, Bibliography