ABSTRACT
Adorno argued that the catastrophic events of recent history revealed that a Romantic conception of dialectics and subjectivity was false, and thus negated the validity of its corresponding flow of temporality. Music that, in its fidelity to its historical moment, has tried to empty itself of the negated forms of subjectivity has also fallen into an empty time. From the compositional perspective, the underlying logic of Goeyvaerts’s Sonata begins with simple organizational patterns whose interactions create a highly complex musical construction. The overall repetition of any pitch does not capture the manner in which the registral fixing, serialized dynamics, and serialized duration emphasize or obscure these repetitions. As a result of the contraction and expansion of the registration of original pitch collections, the overall texture begins with predominantly ‘punctual’ sounds, moves toward an almost contrapuntal-like middle, and return to the punctual sounds.
