Extra-musical world

Idea Raw material

(general, undefined) (continuum)
[Unavailable, but closer
to availability by
triangulation with the Thought
(Gestalt)

Musical language Available

(general structure of through analysis
material) of genre and
rhetoric

Articulation Available
(in sound: tension, dissonance-consonance; in through
rhythm: thesis, arsis; disjunctive, individualising: syntactical
the phrase) analysis

Relation Available
(repetition, variation, motif; conjunctive, through motivic
connecting: cohesion) analysis

Form Available
(linking the thoughts) through formal
analysis

Work Available
(the idea realised) through a linear
reading of the
score
Effect on the extra-
musical world
Fig. 1

threshold of the Idea itself—and at the summit of all those elements which
occupy the specifically musical sphere. All this seems nicely in accord with the
statement made earlier in this paper that “in general, the principle applies that
the more evidence we amass, and from the greater variety of sources, the more
confident we may feel that we are on a warm trail leading us towards fidelity.”
But, of course, Krenek’s model does interpose the crucial stage of the formu-
lation of the Musical thought and its associated Gestalt. To the performer seek-
ing to climb a “ladder of access” towards the point where he or she is vouch-
safed some kind of revelation of the composition’s essence, this is a more than
trivial degree of extra separation. Moreover, the process by which, according
to Krenek, the musical thought and Gestalt translate themselves into musical
Language is not a symmetrically reversible one. The thought may have made
the Language what it is, but we will search in vain for a way of extrapolating
from the Language any reliable notion as to just what it was in the thought

19

Figure 1. Krenek’s diagram (Krenek 1966, 149).