In music, moment form is defined as "a mosaic of moments", and, in turn, a moment is defined as a "self-contained (quasi-)independent section, set off from other sections by discontinuities."Heh! Like the definition of "ontology" in philosophy, that confuses as much as it clarifies! Ontology: the study of being qua being. Heh, again. The Wikipedia article has some background, but it is still confusing. Let me give my take on the subject. The first moment form piece I played was, as I said the other day, Night Rain by Tony Genge. In this piece each player has several little "cells" or "moments" meaning little melodic fragments or phrases. How they come together is different with each performance and so there is no rhythmic co-ordination. However, the two players are listening to one another and shaping how they play and what moment they choose according to the context. The effect is of an open, floating kind of atmosphere. You can't get this effect by writing down notes in a row in a rhythmic pattern.
One piece by Stockhausen that I always found interesting is his Klavierstüke XI which is described as follows:
Klavierstück XI consists of 19 fragments spread over a single, large page. The performer may begin with any fragment, and continue to any other, proceeding through the labyrinth until a fragment has been reached for the third time, when the performance ends. Markings for tempo, dynamics, etc. at the end of each fragment are to be applied to the next fragment.This is rather different from how his other moment form pieces are structured and also rather different from how Tony Genge's is structured and how mine are structured. What they all have in common are two fundamental things: there is no fixed linear "narrative" and the performance will be different on every occasion. For me, the appeal is that instead of marching through the piece in a measured way, the feeling is of being in a space where events are occurring in somewhat unpredictable ways. Why this is appropriate for my string quartet movement is that I am trying to re-create a specific, unusual atmosphere that I experienced in an Old Growth forest. You are surrounded by enormous trees, like being in a great, natural cathedral, and you hear various levels of sound: a very indefinite soughing of the wind in the trees, the occasional creaking of branches, an isolated bird song and so on. The light is subdued, like dusk, as the sun rarely breaks through to the forest floor.
I am structuring this movement in certain ways so it is largely free within organized boundaries. What I am trying to do is cultivate the right atmosphere but doing it within a harmonic structure.
I hope this helps a bit to understand what moment form is all about! Oh, one final thought. Moment form brings out an interesting ambiguity in the concept of musical notation. Notation in Western music got established when Guido de Arezzo came up with the idea of orienting the notes around a line that specified a pitch. This developed into the five-line staff we use today. The idea is that standard musical notation, sometimes called "vocal" notation, is a kind of transcription of what a performance will be. Oh, those are the notes they are playing! But there are other kinds of notation, particularly tabulature. This looks like vocal notation because it uses staff lines, but instead of dots there are numbers or letters. Tablature, used by the lute and guitar, shows you where to put your fingers, but it does not show what sound will result. So tablature is a set of instructions, not a transcription. Moment form notation, which looks like regular notation, is in a sort of grey zone: it is kind of a set of instructions to the players: you do this and you do this. But it does not show what the result will be. There cannot be a moment form "score."
Here is the aforementioned Klavierstüke XI by Stockhausen:
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