Introduction

The evocative title for this essay refers to the sense that in performance music moves – and we with it – in complex and ever-changing ways. The word ‘form’ generally connotes morphological paradigms: familiar tonal schemes such as ‘binary’, or ‘ternary’, or ‘sonata’, or their refashioned derivatives in the twentieth-century post-tonal epoch. However, for Syrinx, the Première rapsodie and ‘Sirènes’ I will discuss only briefly their morphological forms. Instead, this study focuses upon the fluid nature of musical materials and relations, a dynamic and rhythmic aspect of musical form that is more often remarked than examined, and for which static morphological form merely provides a framework.

Among the assumptions that direct the analyses herein, two in particular warrant mention: first, that compositions consist of congeries of diverse musical events, whose concatenations over time convey impressions of vitality to us as listeners and performers; and second, that these impressions are a crucial aspect of musical experience – hence the frequent recourse in conversation about music (albeit less often in its literature) to animate metaphors in paired oppositions such as ‘ebb and flow’, ‘rise and fall’, ‘intensification and relaxation’, ‘approaching towards and receding from’, ‘climax and release’. Sources for this sense of vitality include the pacing over time of changes in musical materials, which imparts a sense of quickening or of slowing, and the varying complexity of musical events over time, which imparts a sense of intensification versus subsidence. Both affective domains convey impressions of tension versus repose and of motion.