The verbalisation of music involves many perils. Musicologists have surmounted those perils by creating suitable concepts and metaphors and by adopting specialised terminology from other scholarly disciplines. The development of scholarly terminology in musicology goes together with the attempt to find the most adequate means for description and characterisation of musical language. One way of doing so is to regard the current of musical sound, flowing in time, as a means of expressing changes of force, tension, quiet or disquiet. This quality of music may be compared to the idea of a dynamised current of sound, in which the listener is able directly to perceive changes of forces, tensions, kinesis and stasis. These changes are conveyed by relationships: harmonic, melodic-formal structural relationships, and also relationships of sound, metre and rhythm, texture, and register.
This study maps the basic features of Godar’s compositional language, particularly in four works: Ricercar for several versions of chamber instrumentation, where the piano has an important sound-painting and harmonic position, Sequence for violin and piano, Talisman for violin, cello and piano, and Sonata in Memory of Viktor Shklovsky for cello and piano, where the piano is both an accompanying and a solo instrument. In these works one can find common denominators: expressive motivic work, movement in tonal, modal, chromatic or atonal space, preference for one interval – for example the minor second (semi-tone) or minor third in combination with triton, rich use of triadic chords from triads through seventh chords to harmonic clusters, and work with contrast in a variety of layers and parameters of musical structure. Apart from the common features, each of the compositions has also its distinctive individual features.
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