ABSTRACT
The musical structuring of Choke engages processes of Spiral Morphing, or in other words, a morphing process that also entails a sense of transformed recurrence. Morphing involves the smooth transition from an earlier event or events to new ones. This chapter refers to the initiating and resulting events as sound things for two reasons. First, sound things have some similarities to motives in the sense that they are relatively short groupings of sounds characterized by specific sonic features, and they function as recognizable units of identity that play a role in the musical thinking of the work. Second, individual sound things or the interaction of distinct sound things in a specified temporal span may morph into new sound things, such that these sound things generate a sense of continuous differing. A sound thing has specifiable sonic features, and in keeping with the Heideggerian concept, the chapter considers sound things in terms of their functions in the musical thinking of Choke.
