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In:Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity
Edited by Anna Piata, Adriana Gordejuela and Daniel Alcaraz Carrión
[Human Cognitive Processing 75] 2022
► pp. 163–186

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Chapter 8
From “slow lettuce” to “striated time”

On Pierre Boulez’s conceptualizations of musical temporality

 | Complutense University of Madrid
Published online: 10 November 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.75.08bes
Abstract
Many trends of the 20th (and 21st) century Western art music have emphasized the value of individual novelty when conceiving art. This ideological imperative has boosted composers’ creativity for developing personal and almost ex novo conceptions of musical attributes and parameters, time among them. Some of these conceptions can be retrieved in the several traces of their compositional practices. My study focuses on composer and conductor Pierre Boulez (1925–2016), and his presentation of some original formulae for managing musical temporality. Through his essays, compositional sketches, scores, and performances, I analyze several cross-modal features, based on embodied experience, and image schemata underlying his time conceptualizations, with the help of cognitive science and in quest of a generalizable model.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Preliminary approaches
    • 2.1Musical time and time in musical composition
    • 2.2Eating kale and expressing musical experience
  • 3.Boulez on time
    • 3.1Smoothness vs striae
    • 3.2Straightness vs curvature
    • 3.3Blocks vs bubbles
  • 4.Expressing temporal ideas beyond language
    • 4.1Engraving time: Boulez’s musical notation
    • 4.2Enacting time: Boulez conducting
  • 5.A provisional model
  • Notes
  • References
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