Edited by Anna Piata, Adriana Gordejuela and Daniel Alcaraz Carrión
[Human Cognitive Processing 75] 2022
► pp. 163–186
Many trends of the 20th (and 21st) century Western art music have emphasized the value of individual novelty when conceiving art. This ideological imperative has boosted composers’ creativity for developing personal and almost ex novo conceptions of musical attributes and parameters, time among them. Some of these conceptions can be retrieved in the several traces of their compositional practices. My study focuses on composer and conductor Pierre Boulez (1925–2016), and his presentation of some original formulae for managing musical temporality. Through his essays, compositional sketches, scores, and performances, I analyze several cross-modal features, based on embodied experience, and image schemata underlying his time conceptualizations, with the help of cognitive science and in quest of a generalizable model.