The sensation and perception of musical qualities, properties, and phenomena have long posed challenges for musical analysis. Unconventional musical materials adopted by recent composers and creators of contemporary music, in particular, raise specific questions about the temporal segmentation and musical classification of spectromorphological form-building units. Recent musical scholarship has demonstrated a growing interest in answering such essential questions from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. This study considers the music of Pierluigi Billone and Georges Aperghis, two composers who have forged artistic practices unlike any of their contemporaries, but who share a common interest in developing the emergence of certain musical qualities of intense fascination within their works. Determining how these phenomena emerge, and under what musical contexts and boundary conditions, is a topic of major concern. A psychoanalytic approach to Billone’s ITI. KE. MI (1995) for solo viola was found to yield a descriptive interpretation of the piece’s musical discourse given its raw materials, while a data-driven audio analysis, relating certain features of a recorded performance to compositional methods encoded in synthesis and notated score, were found to best describe the musical necessities of Aperghis’ 2004 opera Avis de tempête. While each composer retains a unique approach to building formal schemes out of their chosen emergent properties, the inclusive pages show that both qualitative and quantitative analytical frameworks can be utilized to describe musical statements created through differing means towards similar ends.

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