and sections indicated in step 3. Thus, steps 3 and 4 disclose two different simultaneous musical
structures.
Step 5, Representation, presents the full lyrics of the Hungarian folk song. The theme is tragic; the
narrator asks a raven to deliver a message to his parents and fiancée that he is ill and willl soon die.
Step 6, Virtual Feeling, reports human feelings expressed in the music, with reference to the syntax
and sound in time descibed in steps 3 and 4. Ferrara identifies an opposition between a declara-
tive main theme and a misty and nebulous background. Key clashes create frenzied tension, which
culminates in an explosion of dissonance. A sense of restful reconciliation evoked by a transparent
structure gives way to gloomy undercurrents in the piano’s low register. The closing measures con-
vey an emphatic wailing, which vanishes in vaporous mist. In sum, the piece displays intense, per-
sonal pain and deeply felt pathos.
Step 7, Onto-historical world, confirms the tragic signification of the piece. New analytical details
support the interpretation that the music represents the transitoriness of human existence. Life suc-
cumbs to death.
Step 8 consists of open listenings, which add new structural observations. Accumulated insight en-
ables the analyst to experience how the sound, syntax, and reference continue to coexist as sepa-
rate strata, yet simultaneously seem to be assimilated into the unified whole of the work.
Step 9, Performance Guide, provides detailed instructions for the pianist’s expressive execution of
the piece, based on the analyst’s analytical observations.
Step 10, Meta-Critique, evaluates the contributions of the different steps to the analysis and interpre-
tation of the music, and concludes that the method’s advantage is the potential synthesis of phenom-
enological and hermeneutical methods with conventional approaches.
Ferrara’s achievement and abandonment
The precision and consistency of Ferrara’s Bartok analysis is admirable, and its conclusions are
convincing. However, the perspective of Ferrara’s eclectic method is reduced in comparison with
the five-step progression he presented in 1984. In the ten-step eclectic method, Ferrara deliberately
downgrades phenomenological exploration in favor of comprehensive and detailed documentation
in score-based analyses. It is crucial that he has eliminated ”the sound as such” and the ensuing
search for any kind of referential meaning that the sounds and their syntax might imply. Instead, he
focuses on ”the sound in time”, which he can verify in the score, and restricts himself to considering
referential meaning which is documented in a text.
These are legitimate personal choices. Nevertheless, Ferrara has abandoned his earlier ac-
complishments. He has abandoned the multi-faceted descriptions of sound and referential meanings
in Varese’s Poème électronique, which interpreted the relationships between sound, culture and the
listener’s lifeworld. Similarly, he has abandoned the approach to phenomenological description and
interpretation of rock music, which he initiated in his article about music in general studies (1986),
but apparently did not continue. However, nothing prevents music analysts and music therapists
from selecting and applying different steps from Ferrara’s methods.
Ferrara has not applied his eclectic method for sound, form and reference in publications after 1991.
He has expanded on Qualitative Research and Philosophical Inquiry in two book chapters (2005:79-
117 and 119-162).