T he M usical O bject R evisited

Abstract

A piece of music presupposes, even before the attempt to create a shape in time, a step back, away from the stuff, so that its substance is clearly distinguished from my own mood, phantasy, feeling, activity. The ultimate problem of the musical work of art lies toward the negative side of autonomy, toward distance and isolation. It is not so much to free music from words, representation, or function, as to free it from ourselves, to externalize it. The musical object must not only be made whole, but also given body, located at a distance and kept there. It must be ‘spatialized’, so to speak. The problem of musical form conceived as a piece is the making of the musical thing. (Patricia Carpenter, ‘The Musical Object’, 1967)

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