Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1984
Abstract
In most cultures of the world, the creative act of composition may be defined simply as the transformation of pre-existing material into new, individualized structures. The precompositional resource may be a system such as the hierarchical arrangement of triads that forms the basis of Western tonality, a set of formulas that generates such genres as Gregorian chant and West African storytelling, or even a rigidly defined set of relationships such as those inherent in a twelve-tone row. In each case, the precompositional elements provide a framework for the analysis and interpretation of the composition.
Included in
Composition Commons, Ethnomusicology Commons, Musicology Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in Ethnomusicology, available at https://doi.org/10.2307/851431