Extra-musical world

Idea Raw material

(general, undefined) (continuum)
Unavailable, but closer
to availability by [Unavailable via any kind of
triangulation with the Thought extrapolation from the
(Gestalt) preceding steps]

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. 2

or its associated Gestalt that meant that this Language, and not another, was
the one most appropriate to be chosen. Whilst we can obviously infer certain
things about a musical thought and Gestalt from the Language, etc., that they
give rise to, there is no way that we can pin down with any certainty or com-
pleteness one unique musical thought and its associated Gestalt and say that
they, and only they, must have been the progenitors of the musical Language,
Articulation, Relation, and Form which we observe in the work. Theoretically,
any number of thoughts and Gestalts might be implicated; and since, at the
stage of the thought/Gestalt we “know nothing of keys, scales, keynotes, conso-
nances, dissonances, chords, or anything of the sort” (Krenek 1966, 141), even
if we could single out a pair of prime suspects we should scarcely be any the
wiser as to their nature because our horizon of conscious understanding stops
short of the realm which they inhabit. We may see the impasse graphically (in
both senses) in the adaptation of Krenek’s diagram, depicted in figure 2. [Fig. 2]

20

Figure 2. The performer’s “ladder of access” to the essence of the Work.