Musical Morphology: A Discourse and a Dictionary

The purpose of the whole book is to serve our understanding of phenomena in relation to principles. A basic premise underlying all considerations is the correspondence of outer phenomena and inner experiences. This psycho-physical parallelism, implied or stated, may refer to the composer and his work, or to the work and the listener—it is always assumed to be present. Every examination of a musical object presupposes that only the analogy of processes in our mind with processes in nature and art permits us to apprehend the outside world. Whatever bias emerges from our approach (idea over realization, ontic over gignetic) is a symptom of our tellurian shortcoming. Regardless of the human tendency to favor one side of a polarity over the other, we know that theoretically both sides are equally valid. SIEGMUND LEVARIE, Professor of Music at Brooklyn College, CUNY, has taught at the University of Chicago, was dean of the Chicago Musical College, and executive director of the Fromm Music Foundation. He has served on the National Council of the American Musicological Society, the National Fulbright Committee on Musicology, and 15 a regular member of the Metropolitan Opera Texaco Quiz panel. The late ERNST LEVV was well known on both sides of the Atlantic as a concert pianist and a prolific composer. He founded the Philharmonic Choir in Paris and directed the first concerts of requiems of Brahms, Verdi, Liszt, and Kodaly. He taught at the New England Conservatory of Music, the University of Vermont, the University of Chicago, M.I. T., and Brooklyn College, CUNY. Both authors have lectured and written widely on musical subjects; their previous book collaboration was Tone: A Study in Musical Acoustics, also published by the Kent State University Press. Previously published in 1980 as: A dictionary of musical morphology.