Plasticity and Metaphor in Thomas Clifton's Approach to Musical Texture

Abstract

The concept of musical texture showed, in its relatively short history within music theory, a kind of resistance with regard to the possibility of an abstract and formalized representation. Thomas Clifton’s approach, such as it is formulated in his posthumous book Music as Heard. A Study of Applied Phenomenology (1983), stands out within the field of American music theory. Its particularity is given, on the one hand, in the treatment of texture as a fundamental aspect of perceptive experience, in contrast to the comparatively marginal attention it usually receives in that field. On the other hand, because it confronts texture’s dominant conception in that field, orientated to the structural configuration of musical simultaneity, with an inherently plastic representation. The article reviews the fundamental aspects of Clifton’s approach, highlighting the role of metaphorical thinking in a non-abstract representation of texture.