Deconstruction And Reconstruction

In the second half of the twentieth century, open structure, a brand new type of music structure, emerged as the new development of music structure innovation of the twentieth century. Adopting the distinct composing language of the era, open structure interacted with the general cultural elements of the era and carried on its structure innovation, which did not rest within the fenced garden of the world of music. This passage is committed to deliver a comprehensive and systematic research of the open structure of the twentieth century. With the sight of deconstruction and reconstruction, it studies how the pioneer Western composers adopts different deconstructive means to break new paths for the traditional closed structure and analyzes the interdisciplinary cultural view behind the open structure and the individualized sense of music of the composers. Furthermore, from the perspective of reconstruction, this passage tries to reveal the development and trends of open structure. The general objective of the research on open structure is to promote new development for the musical structure theory.The articles consists of seven chapters. The first chapter introduces how the concept and theory of open structure comes into being and the past attempts of its formation. It puts forward two structural types based on their dialectic relationship: the closed structure and the open structure. Through the analysis of this pair of opposing structural forces, this chapter helps to determine the value of the research on and the main theory of the open structure. From the second to the sixth chapter comes the central part of the passage, which is divided into two parts. Here, the notions of open structure of the post-1950 s composers and their practices are particularly manifested. The first part, Through the perspective of deconstructivism,which consists of the second and the third chapter, delivers a comparative study of the concrete structural patterns of open structure between four Western composers and their works: Earle Brown and his Available FormsⅡ, Jone Cage and his Music of Changes, Pierre Boulez and his Third Piano Sonata and Karlheinz Stockhausen and his Momente. The author of this passage digged into the core of these works and made a careful technical analysis of both the micro structural elements and the macro structural paths. At the same time, the author investigated the different cultural elements upon which Western composers developed their structural notions, revealing the various deconstructive strategies they adopted to open the closed structure and the efforts they devoted to the innovation of music structures. The fourth to sixth chapters consists of the second half. Through the perspective of constructivism, the author mainly discussed how open structure, after the deconstruction of the closed structure, inspired and influenced the new round of music composing. Based on the former studies, this part makes a selective and multi-dimensional analysis of three works with different ages, regions and styles: Lutoslawski and his Jeux Venitiens, Reily and his In C and Tan Dun and his Ghost Opera. Further attempts are made to study their new composing paths after open structure is established. Finnaly, in the last chapter of the passage, the author evaluated and reflected on the significance of deconstruction and construction of open structure and pointed out its value and the remaining questions worth of further studies.