"Musical Form and Musical Performance" Reconsidered

Abstract

Performance appeared in 1968.1 Although widely discussed, it occasioned scant attention in the musical press. The reviews it did receive were mostly flattering but perfunctory. I can find only one full-scale attempt to evaluate its arguments and respond to them, Wallace Berry's critique in Perspectives of New Music, although it has been discussed at some length in essays by Robert Morgan and Carl Schachter.2 For reasons that should be obvious, I myself could not accept the book for review, and only recently have I been able to give it the renewed attention that some of its readers apparently think it deserves. Each of the essays that comprise Musical Form and Musical Performance is complete in itself (since their origin was a series of lectures); yet they embody a single point of view and elaborate a single argument. That argument proceeds more by analogy than by logic, with illustrations drawn from the other arts as well as from music itself. For the most part these display broad interest and sympathetic understanding on the part of the author. Occasionally, however, his range of knowledge tempts him to be a bit pretentious, and on at least one occasion he is caught out by this tendency. If he insists on referring to Genet's