Variant Construction: Part 2 - Examples

Having established the definitions in Part 1 we can start looking at various works. We'll start with Beethoven's 7th, which I've chosen because its use of theme is very regular and apt to be looked at in the light of these ideas.


The chief thing to note here is the structure and use of the primary theme and how it is used throughout the piece. Save for the first chord played by the winds, this theme starts off the movement repeating three times unadorned, varying only the pitch of the notes in its chords, before being raised up and having additional material introduced underneath to support it.

The important thing to look at here is how this skeleton of the theme introduces a regular, straightforward beat structure that is used mostly consistently (until we get past the first 100 bars anyway) and that it also clearly ends on a strong, solid beat, which itself ultimately ends up resolving the piece and the thematic material, which means that it can act here as a Canonical Sequence in itself. An EVA-SGN should have no trouble following this theme through the majority of the movement, and the secondary themes will parallel it directly for most of its use. Things can start to get hairy around the 5 minute mark when things start to get mixed up for the fugato section where the theme does become abridged and has its material shoved into off-beats on occasion, but most of the movement is built around canonical structures that are amendable to being followed by EVA-SGNs. Here is an illustration of the basic structure of this part of the music, which should be understandable by EVA-SGNs.

The red arrows each cover the course of each individual instance of a theme, while the blue ones indicate that the section of music they are coming from is a response to the section of music being pointed to (which may in turn be a response to another, which responds to another, and so on). Both elements coincide here, but for reasons you'll understand later, I've illustrated all these elements to later contrast with examples that don't follow these 'rules'. It's important to note that each yellow+purple section represents the equivalent of a full instance of a theme, which is 8 bars in the Beethoven example being used (the purple 'End' representing the final bar).

Even an EVPN should be able to gain some enjoyment out of the piece, though not without difficulty. The section at 2:50 (after bar 100) a will very well likely grate on the nerves of someone without EVP, as the way this dramatic build up of the primary themes gives way to the softness of a separate melody with a differently structured beat will annoy the hell out of them and abruptly deflate the mood that the previous section built up (I suspect that this is likely why certain movie trailers that use such music will chop out sections where this happens). And given that EVPNs will not hear distinct vocal lines as such, the fugal section will naturally be incomprehensible to them as they will not perceive the strings as multiple layers of voices carrying different parts of the various themes simultaneously.

To make it clear, here is what I predict individual experiences of those with specific perceptual modality will be like:

EVN-SPN : Capable a of fragmented enjoyment of the piece (especially if one imagines visual imagery of forms of heroic conflict while listening) based around the more regular repetitive structure. After the bar 100 transition, will likely find the music transforms in a way that is repulsive and kills the mood of what they were imagining, with no clear way to reconcile how they expected the dramatic structure and pulse to continue with how it actually plays out.

EVA-SPN: Capable of following the thematic material, its continuation and most transformation for the bulk of the piece. After bar 100, can perceive the introduction of new thematic material and its use to be a clear response to previous material. Can perceive multiple voices simultaneously in the fugato section, but will likely not be capable of following this structure in full.

EVN-SPA: I have not experienced this so I cannot comment on what it is like to listen to music in this state, which is currently hypothetical and may not even exist as far as I know.

EVA-SPA: Fully capable of following the whole work in principal. After bar 100, the cadence of the primary theme can be followed and interpreted as being continued through the three note motif that runs through the bass notes immediately after, with each string beat being interpreted as simultaneously the first and last note of the four note cell that the primary theme finishes on (I must note that I'm mentioning this specifically because I never noticed this before writing this article, and only after looking carefully for transformations of the primary theme did I become aware of this possibility. As such, I won't put too much stock in this, but I feel I had to mention it because it occurs at the same thematic transition point (bar 100) that I otherwise wanted to use to strongly illustrate the differences between EVN-SPN and EVA-SPN, and assumed that no significant SPA elements would occur at this point).







Now, for a contrast, I offer this. This piece is one that I have chosen because the backing beat is the simplest I know of that I believe, based on my own experience, EVA-SGNs will have trouble parsing.

Here I have outlined how the basso continuo begins and repeats through most of the piece, from its inception (first bar here), through most of the repeating body (second bar between the repeats) and then onto the final bar of the main section at around 4:48 (third bar). I want to make it clear that the cadence (and the tonic key) falls on F, the note on which the motif begins, but each bar ends on a prolonged dominant, before falling to a shorter beat that starts the three quarter note length 'cell' (proceeding from quarter to half note, occupying half of each bar and a quarter of the continuo motif) that perpetuates through the piece. The relative shortness of the F note that begins each bar after the first makes it 'technically' valid in some sense, but completely unsatisfying as the resolution to the previous bar. The melody quickly skips to the next note rather than offer an immediately satisfying resolution in itself (in contrast to the theme highlighted in the previous Beethoven example). Now, to make myself clear, my entire basis for saying this is simply based on what I feel personally and what I have felt when listening to the piece in the past, given I know firsthand what it feels like to listen to it both with and without SGP. I won't try to offer a theoretical explanation for this, so for now I'll just have to ask you to bear with me and listen yourself to see if you feel the same.

So, if we accept that this way of hearing it is unsatisfying, than how might someone possibly reinterpret it in order to avoid this? By this I mean find a way of re-parsing the structure of the music, much in the same way that a person stumbling upon a semantic ambiguity in a sentence that results in them interpreting it in a way that doesn't immediately result in a sensible meaning or grammatical structure might re-parse it mentally to gain something that hopefully does end up making sense as a grammatical sentence [1]. Though here with this musical example, there is only musical feeling without any concrete meaning, I still believe that listeners can attempt to re-parse the thematic structure of music in similar ways to how they re-process sentence structure in normal language, since I also hold that musical themes are processed with the same mental faculties.

The answer in this particular case is through Variant Addition, which I conjecture is only available to SGPAs.

With the Montiverdi baseline, in which the resolution of each two bar section is implicitly the next bar, the starting note of which is generally way too short to offer a satisfying resolution until the final bar, the only way to listen to the piece that lets it really flow is to allow the mental processes behind Variant Addition to continually suspend the desire to hear the theme resolve with a strong solid F, and instead reinterpret each whole repetition of the theme body as an extension of the previous that parallels what has come before, until finally everything resolves at the very end of the piece. If you understand what I am saying and are confident that this is how you hear the piece, then congratulations, you have SGP. But if you either don't understand it or aren't confident you have SGP, read on.

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Here, I will try to take a structure from the piece that makes use of Variant Addition and modify it, taking sections from the actual piece and rearranging them to form a different composition, in order to create something else that is a Canonical Sequence which I feel represents parts of the total sequence and how the piece might flow were it 'reduced' to that. However, I don't believe there is any mechanical way of doing this, and in modifying the piece you will possibly end up with something that 'makes sense' as a Canonical Sequence, yet is invariably unsatisfying musically (in a way, I'm essentially doing a re-composition similar in kind, but in some sense opposite of what Bernstein attempts in his lecture on musical syntax* here https://youtu.be/r_fxB6yrDVo?t=1h1m). In this case though, the simplicity of the structure makes this a seemingly easy task, and so in the audio clip below I offer a reduction of the theme into a simple canonical form, turning it into a complete short phrase.


AUDIO HERE

Zefiro Torna, Prime

But what if we do want to take this and use Variant Addition to add clear forms of symmetry to it, in order to illustrate what kind of things are possible in doing so? To this end, I've also created this expansion of the theme body, extending the theme that I've labeled prime.


AUDIO HERE

Here you will notice certain features that were lacking in the more reduced form. For one, there are now many layers. each covering the other, which I use to indicate both how material is transformed (black arrows), and how it can constitute a response (blue arrows). Notably, I've put in black arrows pointing from one block section to another. These indicate how variant addition has allowed the extending out of a thematic structure by repeating part of its body (which is this case has been slightly modified by canonical transformation, splitting up a note to weaken the start of the body, creating Body2), which should enable EVA-SPAs to interpret this repetition as a delay of the actual resolution. Instead, the whole of the second body instance, plus its resolution (Pause), becomes the resolution of the first body. This constitutes the theme indicated by the lowest red arrow on the chart.

But wait, there's more of course. We can see that the end section of this thematic structure, which I've labeled pause, coincidences with the start of a second group of block-body structures that repeat the whole of the previous group verbatim, and which itself is another example of the variant extended body of the theme in its own right, which is represented by the second red arrow directly above the first. So here we have another repetition of the theme body, which overlaps the first and ends in the Full End, which consists of a dotted whole note. This creates a kind of thematic ambiguity, which I believe is similar in some ways the half-enjambments that might occur in high verse, allowing the structure to flow smoothly across this similarly formed boundary in similar ways.

So we have something interesting here, we've extended out the body of the first theme once, then 'ended' it (thought only partially, as the melody still continues) by repeating a copy of the (still not totally finished) theme via using Variant Addition again on Body1+Body2 together, repeating it from the top to make another Body1+Body2, while fusing it to the original structure, then finally adding a full bar resolution on the end of it all.

All this together creates the full theme and top layer of our piece, represented by the highest red arrow which (unlike the other red arrows below) fills out the whole of the top bracket without overextending. This, in a way, 'solves' our ambiguity.** Both lower red arrow themes can be interpreted as being part of a 2x2 extension of the theme body, which runs through each of the 'joins' produced by interpreting the body structure as being doubled through parallel variant addition on both levels, then finally ends unambiguously and comes to a rest. Each level of variant addition takes part of a structure, uses a different kind of parallelism to imply to an SGPA that they can and should interpret that repetition as an extension of that structure (even if that substructure was created via a similar process) and in turn enables them to interpret the whole thing as a theme structurally extended out in a way that is musically significant, but which should in principal be impossible to fully experience without poetic super grammar.

Going back to the original Monteverdi composition, you can try to listen to the whole thing with this in mind. However, where I modified it into an implied 2x2 structure to make the processes of interpretation easier to understand to those who are capable of it, the actual madrigal contains no such implications. Instead, the bass simply repeats continuously, which can very well naturally be interpreted as continuous, one-at-a-time, body-block by body-block Variant Addition that just runs through the piece (the hierarchical structure of which is  ambiguous in the absence of any other info). In fact, I'd argue that the continuo runs against the singing in such a way that implies that the boundaries coinciding with the variant joins occur so they parallel similar structure in the vocal section, even if the listener wouldn't necessarily interpret them in this way otherwise, and thereby creates a sense continuous, extended forward motion that glues all the vocal parts together. See if you can feel this effect.


Now, wait again, just for one final bit. What if we went back to our theme with the doubly extended body, and simply played it back to back on repeat? Then we'd get a structure that we could illustrate like this:

Note here that the top brackets have a blue arrow (indicating the latter part is a response to the former), but no black arrow linking them. This is because, being a copy of a completed variant theme, the listener can happily just expect a similar structure to follow if it does so, without having to continue to suspend their expectations for the theme's resolution, since they can use the completed first as a model for the expectations for the second. Variant addition may still be employed in interpretation, but each section is its own instance of a thematic segment that parallels the other without sharing or extending structure, like each one was similar to a section of a movement, (i.e. the two A sections of the AABB structure of the Bach Organ Sonata no. 1 referenced before).

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* I do explicitly deny Bernstein's claims that the specifically ambiguity producing desire for symmetry as it applies to music discussed in this video is a truly universal property of the human mind. Rather I specifically want to claim otherwise, that only certain sorts of symmetry will be perceived relatively universally, and that without having unlocked super grammar the perception of symmetry will be more limited and these ambiguities will not have all the large scale structural effects he talks about. Though despite this, the establishment of strong and weak beats in rhythm is still meaningful with regards to its use in the Mozart symphony referenced.

** It is important to note that certain forms of these structures, which can enable what is termed elisions, can actually be interpreted in a specific way by EVA-SPNs. Namely, as long as the start of the theme that begins while the other ends can be interpreted as being a different voice (which requires that it has its own melodic line, which should have a different key/resister and ideally separate instrumentation), then Variant Addition is not needed to interpret it as such. In this way, the listener may hear the second theme instance in counterpoint and as a response to the first, rather than as an extension of the phrase. So, given that no phrase extension occurs in this kind of interpretation (which would require SGP otherwise), and that interpreting basic counterpoint in itself only requires EVP, these structures can be made sense of without SGP. 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_processing

Variant Construction: Part 1 - Definitions

I want to get into the actual nitty-grity of the structures that are dependent on each perceptual modality here and illustrate them through example. So to start off I will try to preemptively define a number of key ideas. These ideas are a work in progress, I don't want to claim that they describe the structure of metered or beat based Art exactly or fully, and any concept is subject to further revision if any new information or a counter example is given that demands that the ideas here need to be revised in order to account for it. These descriptions are abstract and technical, and they will not necessarily be immediately obvious or easy to understand, but I want to offer these definitions straight up so that they can handily be referred to as I explain how they work in context. Ideally, I am targeting a reader with some background in musicology, and linguistics or computer science, so be warned. I am also assuming that the reader has read the previous posts which provide the framework needed to understand where I am coming from when I discuss the concepts I wish to detail.

However, do not fear. In creating this set of articles, I am faced with a conundrum. The best way to illustrate these ideas is to provide specific examples that demonstrate them in action and allow the reader to either experience them directly, if they are able to, or to otherwise come to the realization that they have not actually developed the mental faculties needed to actually understand them. This is something that I intend to do in the subsequent parts of this publication. However, in order to succinctly provide the examples without necessary redundancy and to show how these ideas work in the context of them, I need to first throw out these definitions, if only to at first provide labels to these concepts that can be referenced in order to show how they each relate to each other. On a first reading of this list of definitions, I do not realistically expect that most readers will understand the majority of it without going through the examples, even if they are highly perceptive.




Modal Faculty (MF):
A 'binary parameter' of a given person's mind that determines how certain aspects of their cognition are processed, which affects the ways they will perceive structural features forming from incoming sense data, and which can potentially become activated (going from off to on) within a given mind at arbitrary stages in someone's life. Encompassing Voice Perception (EVP) and Super Grammatical Perception (SPG) are the two main modal faculties which form the basis for this theoretical framework (the Theory of Modal Consciousness) at this current time. There may well be other examples of human mental processes that could also be classified as modal faculties, but I don't yet know enough to be able to confidently claim this is the case for any specific example. It is important to note that the 'parameters' of the Principles and Parameters framework in generative linguistics are not modal faculties, they arise (if they actually do) in accordance with the processing of a given language grammar and aren't things that have global effects on a person's cognition.

Modal Faculty Table		Encompassing Voice Perception
		Available (EVPA)	Not Available (EVPN)
Super Grammatical Perception	Available (SGPA)	EVA-SGA	EVN-SGA
	Not Available (SGPN)	EVA-SGN	EVN-SGN

Canonical Sequence (CS):
A 'grammatically well formed' sequence of words (in a recognized language) or musical notes (belonging to families of themes that have been encountered) that add up to a complete sentence or self resolving theme while spanning a metric structure (of a song or poem) in such a way that develops and resolves what is perceived (by EVPAs) as tension. The core concept here is a set or verbal/musical elements that are recognized by the language faculties as fitting into a form recognizable as being something that plays out in an expected and 'correct' or satisfying way, feeling subjectively like a sentence has been completed when finished and presented in full, while at the same time not being modified by Variant Addition (defined below) or requiring any Super Grammatical faculties to comprehend. This is true of both regular (non poetic) sentences in a  language and themes in a musical composition. Both of them are processed by the language centers of the mind when they are perceived. What counts as a Canonical Sequence isn't necessarily set at the outset when a given person encounters a given work though, as a person hearing a piece of music for the first time may not have heard the forms of the themes and motifs that make up the piece beforehand, or there may be words or forms of speech that they are unfamiliar with, even thought SGP seems to enhance the ability of a person to immediately learn and store these structures in an aspect of working memory.

Along this line of thought, while canonical sequences may be considered part of some kind of language, it is more fruitful here in my view to consider the mental process of assimilating linguistic constructs as a continuous, ongoing and organic process, rather than something that results in a final, well defined set of constructs that either each are or are not valid as part of a single formal system (as might be the case in a formal grammar). This is an issue that I want to discuss further in the future, but for now, we'll define a canonical sequence as something that can in principal be parsed in full and understood to feel complete by someone who hasn't developed SGP.


- Canonical Transformation (CT):
A modification of a Canonical Sequence (chiefly a musical theme constituting a phrase in this case), such that when it is presented directly after a previous CS, it is mentally interpreted by someone with EVP (whether or not they have SGP) as being a direct response to the previous CS in a way that parallels it. Particular kinds of regular transformations of musical themes count as CTs, such as transposition to a different key and augmentation and diminution. The primary theme of Beethoven's fifth as used in the first movement of the symphony shows just how much expressive power these transformations are capable of. *


It should also be noted that embellishment and the addition of notes between other notes that fit into the overall structure are also actually permitted examples of CTs and will generally be perceived by an EVA-SGN as sensible and meaningful transformations/continuations of a theme. Likewise, the implicit opposite, the deletion of notes on more minor beats in order to create a skeletal form of the melody while preserving major beats in the same shape within the metric structure, is also a valid Canonical Transformation. CTs essentially preserve the overall perceived shape and form of the theme. Conversely, things than an EVA-SGN will not feel are complete, valid thematic transformations that fit into the overall structure of a work are considered Advanced Transformations instead of canonical ones.



- Full and Partial Enjambment:
The breaking of a poetic line so that a sentence lying on it continues past the line's end before completing a grammatically whole valid phrase, creating tension across the metric lines it spans and ending the line 'weakly'. Especially impactful when the line end forms part of a rhyming scheme, to the point where the emphasis produced this rhyme might seem to go against this feeling of the line being incomplete (which is a notable phenomena by itself which I'll argue has its own significance). It's notable that I was unable to recognize or understand full enjambment until after I had developed Encompassing Voice. This, along with the fact that I was unable to properly perceive metric structure in unrhymed verse until gaining SPG, is why I believe that enjambment in unrhymed verse is only possible to understand with both EVP and SGP.

The feeling enjambment evokes when I encounter it across rhymed lines is very much the same as that of tonal tension across measures in music; so, as far as I can tell, EVP is likely necessary to process full enjambment through rhyme. However, I admit the possibility that enjambment was simply something I was not used to beforehand, and that I simply mistakenly interpreted line endings as full completions of a thought because I didn't know how to approach them or understand the kind of mental process involved in comprehending them. As such I may have been able to process enjambment earlier had I been informed of its nature, so I can't rule out the possibility that EVP isn't strictly needed for it. Even so, I'll assume for now this it is actually the case that enjambment is something that requires Encompassing Voice and that the mental equipment that allows a person to process lines ending on incomplete phrases, while also rhyming together, and appreciating this combination of elements, is specific to EVP.
I introduce the term full enjambment, as opposed to other forms, in order to distinguish between tension resulting directly from phrases that are immediately and clearly incomplete, and phrases that could be interpreted as complete initially (save for punctuation indicating otherwise), only for it to then be revealed on the subsequent line(s) how the phrase was actually a smaller part of a larger one, potentially encouraging retroactive reinterpretation as opposed to immediately clear tension, which I'll label partial enjambment. While both are ways of carrying tension through a line end, I use Full Enjambment to point out the least ambiguous cases of this, though I'm not entirely sure if it is possible to make a hard categorical distinction between the two in poetry, or if it's a finer matter of degree that is difficult to define.



- Variant Addition:
Variant Addition is a process that arises out of SGP which acts on canonical sequences when they are presented in the context of a work of art, by allowing modifications and extensions of their structure and form. This is an 'advanced' transformation of canonical forms that isn't considered a Canonical Transformation. Variant Addition allows the extension of canonical structures by repeating subsections of them in order to elongate them, and for these elongated structures to then form parts of larger super structures (which may in turn be substructures of larger super structures). Doing so creates a Variant Structure.

One notable use of this is the ability to take a musical theme and, at the point where it would finish with a cadence (which typically, but not always, extends into the next measure), instead of actually playing the implied tonic key of the sequence, repeat the whole theme from the beginning instead. In this way the whole sequence, instead of resolving at that point (to then potentially be followed with another sequence after in response), uses an entire copy of itself which itself as a whole becomes the resolution in place of the final note that would have resolved the original. As such, this allows the structural delay of the resolution of a Canonical Sequence beyond what would otherwise be possible using only Canonical Transformations through various kinds of false cadences and methods of extending and delaying the resolution. But it isn't actually necessary to repeat the whole of a structure beyond the final part to count as a variant structure. Substructures within a sequence or theme, such as a single bar, can be made to repeat (though possibly subject to transposition and other such CTs) additional times beyond the number it appeared in a given canonical sequence. The point to understand is that subsections of a given sequence can be felt to respond to one another (as the person intuitively mentally tracks the substructure) while at the same time, how these sections fit in to the super structure they are a part of can also be acknowledged, so that the enclosing super structure can continue where it left off when the perceived repetition ends. An SGPN can still follow along with parts of this kind, but they will not feel that they meaningfully contribute to the formation of larger super structures that are meaningfully different from a given canonical sequence they are a canonical transformation of. A key difference between canonical sequences and the larger, variant structures that might be based off them is that the extended variant structures can themselves be repeated, with the response mirroring those structural extensions that might have been introduced, and this repetition can, together, potentially form part of a larger and more extended structure yet again, with the listener/reader implicitly keeping track of the general form as a whole as they get used to feeling it out, using it to mold their structural expectations of the sequence when it occurs through rest of the piece in order to generate larger, richer and more complex musical phrased from it. SGPNs without the ability to comprehend Advanced Transformations, on the other hand, will be limited to listening to the sequences 'theme-by-theme', with no expectations that themes form part of larger structures built up through them. Often, and especially for more complicated structures, the 'listener' will have to re-parse their impression of the work if they didn't comprehend it previously, and following along with a candidate parse before revising this in light of additional awareness of the work and it's contents is frequently a normal part of taking in such works.

As a general principal of interpreting musical composition, the creation of structures out of tension that feel they ought to lead to a cadence, then suspending the actual cadence proper by the insertion of other (repeating), intermediate structures in order to extent the structure (thereby creating a variant of a canonical theme), and allowing these structure to respond to each other (placing them side by side), in order to create multi-layered tonal hierarchies, is the signature process of variant addition when it operates on music.

- Variant Construction: is a generalization of this that makes use of the same mental processes of variant addition in order to extend phrases, but includes phrase extensions that add non-repetitive material (i.e. that link potentially separate themes that aren't canonical transformations of each other into larger phrases) and allows overlapping combinations of ambiguous grouping structures.

Hence, in this way SGP allows the structural extension of thematic material in ways beyond what is possible with just EVP, allowing the build up and resolution of hierarchical structures, where linear, sequential structures would only be possible with EVP alone. Because of this, themes and motifs can be embedded inside other themes (including themselves), in order to vary and be threaded through each other, even on a single instrumental line, and movement subsections and sections leading into extended cadences can be built up using these methods.

I do not claim that this is in any way an exact process though, as it depends on the listener's individual interpretation and how they interpret subtitles of phrasing, along with the dramatic, empathetic and emotional drive of the music and their experience of it.


At this point I want to point out something very important, and which might otherwise confuse people. I'm using the term 'variant' to talk about something specific which is not the same as what musicologists would traditionally call a 'variation' (of a theme). A "variation of a theme" is specifically closer to and generally shares more in common with what I've chosen to term a 'canonical transformation', though there is some potential for overlap in these terms, as a given "variation of a theme" may have some elements of 'canonical' transformation and some elements of 'variant' transformation relative to another instance of a theme. The distinction, in each case, consists in the difference of mental faculties needed to comprehend the respective transformations, EVP for canonical and SGP for variant respectively.



-Decoration Bias:
Here I want to talk about something I will call decoration bias. I want to speak about the kinds of things which can fit into a canonical sequence, or even a regular sentence or passage of music that doesn't hold any tension or which fits into a metric surface without any disruption, and so can still be parsed by a SGPN, but which have a special importance when encountered with SGP. That is to say, when an SGPA encounters them in a beat based artwork, they will be felt to be especially significant in ways that an SGPN will not and can, as such, be used to redirect attention to particular features of the work in ways that will not be apparent to SGPNs. So in effect, SGP will bias the attention of the perceiver to particular features, or decorations, that otherwise would not be considered structurally meaningful. Some examples are as follows:

-Melodic Inversion: Inversion of tones in music is something that, while technically a valid aspect of the development of a musical theme or motif that forms part of a Canonical Transformation, is not something that an SGPN will feel is particularly meaningful in its own right when used sequentially (i.e.the change in pitch of a given note compared to the previous in the melody is changed from down to up or up to down). Rather, an inversion will feel like a very distant and vague transformation that simply shares the overall beat structure of the notes regardless of the melody itself, but which happens to be 'upside down'. It's only with SGP that inversion stands out as a particularly notable feature that will strongly feel like a very close, but reversed, relative of the original melody.


This piece (BWV525, mvt. 3) is a fantastic tour of large scale melodic inversion, but it might otherwise sound silly or pointless if this doesn't affect you. At about 2:05 you can hear the primary theme being played in inversion.

-Alliteration and Assonance: These are poetic features that will direct the attention of an SGPA and inform their understanding of a poem's structure by highlighting things the poet wants to emphasize/connect up. SGPAs will intuitively feel that these features are meaningful and 'brighten up' the language, as if painting words with similar features a given colour to emphasize this relationship between them. SGPNs will not feel that these features will have this effect and may notice them, but won't see them as a feature that naturally integrates into and shapes the poem in any significant way.


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It's probably important to discuss this now, so I will mention that even without SGP, pieces are free to introduce new thematic material and melodies in addition to any previous material in any way that works out as long as it fits in to the tonal and harmonic structure of the rest of the work. I'm deliberately going to be very vague about this, as the variety of ways that this can occur is naturally immense and involves some ambiguity as whether a given part is 'really' a transfiguration of a given theme or the introduction of new material or what interpretive stance you take on that. However, as long as each part is allowed to resolve as a Canonical Sequence, instead of having deeper structures intentionally built out of it via Variant Addition it will not perpetually violate a SPGN listener's expectations of resolution.

Now, having gotten that out of the way you may very well be confused. Don't worry, as I'm throwing out these quite abstract ideas in order to reference them later as I illustrate them with actual examples. You should note though, that so far I have mostly been relating these structures to how they occur in music. There is a reason for this. It is that I conjecture that the ability to perceive metric structure at all in more advanced forms of poetry, which lack a strict beat in time or rhyming to mark out lines and which rely on syllable emphasis and line breaks to form the block structure of their metre, depend on SGP in order for that metre to be apparent at all. As such, there is no metric structure to speak of in particular forms of poetry without SGP, and as such sensible Canonical Sequences will not necessarily be perceived in such poetry the first place, just words forming what might otherwise appear to be barely grammatical or intelligible sentences. As a consequence, enjambment has little meaning outside of rhyming or particularly musical poetry, as there will be no perceived structure to break across. Because of this I feel the need to add a final, additional definition.

- High Verse:
Poetry, similar in kind to blank verse and free verse, where line endings don't necessarily have a clear structural marker (like a rhyming scheme) and which instead rely on mental processes implicit in SGP (like Variant Addition, among others) in order to allow a person to intuitively mark out their intended structure.


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In subsequent articles I will give firm examples showing what I mean by all this, so don't worry if you are having trouble understanding anything, especially if you suspect you lack any of the perceptual abilities I've outlined.


* The actual nature of the main, four note theme/motif as used in the first movement of the fifth symphony is interesting given how short and abrupt it is. But because of this, it seems to be the case that it can be used in a variety of ways in the context of the movement, allowing a, listener to follow a great deal of its development without demanding they are necessarily be capable of perceiving Variant structures. It's arguable that it should be called a motif instead of a theme, but I'm going to call it a theme here because its structure seems to be sufficient enough that anyone with EVP should be capable of perceiving it drive the movement to its resolution, even without SGP.