WHAT IS AN EVENT? The EVENT Schema, Circumstances, Metaphor And Gist

The concept of ‘event’ is examined in the context of the electroacoustic music. Initial insights are gleaned from the study of ‘event’ in linguistics, in particular, the work of Johnson and Lakoff that reveals universal features of how we think about ‘events’. Narayanan’s work on linguistic aspect serves as the basis for a proposed EVENT schema, a mental model of the states and processes of an ‘event’. The EVENT schema’s properties relate it to important issues of artistic content including causality, resources and metaphorical meaning. In the realtime process of listening to a piece of electroacoustic music, the EVENT schema is bound together with particular Circumstances. Even when an ‘event’ cannot be completely assimilated, the listener constructs the gist of the ‘event’. This notion of gist similarly relates to the intentional impoverishment of Circumstances experienced in electroacoustic music, an artistic abbreviation that leaves open space for the imagination.