The work is based on a linguistic model used the previous year in Canzone III for seven brass instruments. It is Ronsard's famous sonnet on the death of Marie. It is analysed not only according to its phonetic elements (as I had done in 1964 for Le son d'une voix), but also according to its syntactic structures. In other words, not only are the phonemes transposed into distinct pitches, but the morphemes (or signifying elements) are translated into specific types of writing. The durations of the model poem recited, the tempi and their variations, the intensities, the sound colours and the 'tones' of the voice are also metamorphosed into musical values according to complex laws. Finally, instead of being sung, the text is broken down into unrecognisable fragments that become mere articulatory devices, while its exceptionally rich sound structure (alliteration, parallelism, repetition, rhyme, assonance, etc.) continues to govern the sequences.
Moreover, beyond all this formal experimentation, Canzone IV also highlights the silences that are part of all speech.

The trace of the model is naturally more perceptible here than in the previous instrumental work, since even some of the words of the poem can be heard despite their fragmented treatment. Basically, this treatment simply pushes to the extreme certain features of Renaissance counterpoint that generally rendered the text they articulated incomprehensible. History then seemed to repeat itself when, in the 1980s, the return to opera, as at its birth four centuries earlier, was accompanied by a rejection of all structural formalism in the name of a more direct and powerful expression.