An interesting class this week. I was really worried because there wasn't any reading set, and I had no idea what to expect. I like the reading assignments because it really helps me get focused for class. It was a really challenging class though. As always, it exposed me to heaps of new music, and really helped contextualize other influences on my work, and particularly the various processes that I've developed and spent time refining over the past few years.
The class focus was on "form and function", with a particular attention to loop based music, or more specifically, analyzing the use of repetition, and how variation of and within that repetition functions with regard to the piece's form. As the approach to this, James introduced us to the notion of organicism. Organicism is the process of analyzing music by distilling it down to it's fundamental parts. In a way, discovering the music's DNA. Often associated with Heinrich Schenker, and his idea that any piece of music can be reduced to a few notes, or minimal musical ideas. The analogy is that a piece of music as a whole can be identified by any of its smaller parts, like saying you can identify a particular forest by a single tree, or that you could identify an individual human by any one of it's cells. So is organicism a compisitional technique? Or is it merely an overly intellectual form of formal analysis? Are the two mutually exclusive?
Segue, and coming at the topic from the other direction, we have process music. When I say the other direction I'm not trying to imply that process music is in any way the opposite to organicism. What I mean is that it's the same discussion, but where organicism is best described in terms of analyzing music, process music, in it's very label, is looking at it in terms of compositional technique. The definition of process music can relate closely to the Morton Feldman article in week 2's readings. In fact, it's pretty hard to think of any music from the 20th century onwards that can't be described in some way as a type of process music. Usually the term is attributed to music where the process of composition becomes the music itself. The example that comes to mind first and foremost is Brian Eno's Discrete Music. In essence it's the Boulez school of thought (from the Feldman article) that he's not concerned with how a piece sounds, as how it's made. Serialism gone wild. Or perhaps the logical progression of it. Or is it? Like the 12tone music of Schoenberg, in Discrete Music, Eno devised a system that controls the outcome of the piece in every way, but unlike serialism, and more closely resembling something Cage might have done, Eno's system makes the process totally hands off. Using an elaborate feedback loop of electronic devices, all highly calculated, and then as sound input Eno uses Pachalbel's Canon in D major. The resulting music has nothing to do with Eno composing or performing anything, but is the result of a process of setting parameters and letting the music create itself. Somehow, through the various arguments/schools of thought on predeterminate/indeterminate musics that came before it, process music is almost the bastard love child of unknown parents.
As an illustration of organicism in action, however, Discrete Music is a great example. The music's very process means dropping in on any point within the piece makes it clear what you're listening to, where it's come from, where it will probably end up. This is just to highlight the relationship of the terms. But further exploration of the terms are needed if we're to really apply them to composition in a broader sense. In class we began with Four Organs by Steve Reich. Now "minimalist" music is an easy sub-genre to reduce down. Reich makes his process incredibly transparent. This whole scene was really about that. Maybe that was what made these names - Reich, Glass, Reiley - accepted in the mainstream, while they made some kind of serious art music, their process' transparency perhaps made it accessible to people. Their use of repetition is another factor, and process music, as it stands as a label for a particular sound, is often ascribed to music that uses repetition a great deal, or more so, music that undergoes a process of change through repetition. So with that in mind, let's look at some other Reich pieces (and in doing so, explore minimalism's obvious relationships with process music and organicism). Like the repetitive and gradual deconstruction of a single chord set to a pulse from a maraca in Four Organs, Reich's Pendulum Music is another process piece that uses repetition and variation. In this piece the process is more similar to Eno's in that it takes the composer further away from of the outcome, by letting something natural - gravity - do all the work. By suspending and then swinging microphones across the room, with amps on the floor that feed back as the mic passes over them to create rhythmic patterns of different frequencies or pitches. Another Reich piece, more traditional in it's approach is Piano Phase. A tiny melodic motive played by two pianists on two pianos set close together. While one player holds perfect time, the other phases slightly out, causing the frequencies and harmonics of the instruments to beat and phase in strange ways that interrupt the natural decay of the instrument, and shift the pattern of the rhythm. This piece is (to refer briefly to comments I made in an earlier post) another great example of tempo variation as a compositional device, as the second player isn't varying their part through any metric modulation, but by speeding up and slowing down in tiny amounts. The piece calls for massive control of tempo, something we're mostly taught to control as stability, not as a parameter in flux. In Piano Phase, the actual melodic information is minute. Where the music actually happens is in the variation, which happens through a process of repetition. Hence, the process becomes the music through that repetition. From a perspective of organicism each of these works can be as easily reduced, as the entire compositional process is one of reduction.
From here on, while I will refer to organisim and process music along the way, I'd like to begin to explore how these things relate to form. If we look at one of Reich's contemporaries, Terry Riley, in particular his piece In C, a piece without specified ensemble or duration. In C consists of 53 phrases set to a pulse. Any instruments, and indeed any number there of can perform the piece. Each phrase may be repeated any number of times before moving on to the next, and so on. The piece is titled In C because the piece is in C Major. So how does the form of this piece function if there is no specified duration? The performers work their way through the piece until it's finished. I always thought of it as a scored improvisation. The form of the work can be very different depending on who and how it is performed. If players are moving through some motives faster than others, the function of how some work against others can completely change the experience. Riley throws some modulations in, using some related key signatures along the way, an F# pops up and we find ourselves In G, but sometimes not every player is at the same point. He also takes the phrases into C Minor. Again, this can have a clashing effect. In essence, it's as if Riley has gone through the process of dissecting a clinical approach to western harmonic music, reducing the piece down to very basic expressions of a C major triad, and slowly adding to it, including the aforementioned modulations that represent standard classic harmony. Rhythmically the phrases all build from a pulse, and evolve in an overlapping way. From a grace note crotchet, through to eventually more complex and overlapping phrases and sustained semibreves. It's hard to tell how Riley has come to this arrangement, but the parts all work with all the other parts, all the time. So the ensemble approach to performing the music can be one of independent progression, or of sympathetic listening - that is to say, where the players progress at an even rate through the phrases, listening and following the flow from one motive to the next. Usually it'll wind up a mix of these (depending on the size of the group, and the time restraints on the performance). Sometimes someone will finish long before the rest, or someone wont make it to the end. As a process, Riley has created parameters and input, but has left the mechanics of those parameters in other hands, like renting out your home fully furnished, or even, giving someone else your life to live, saying "here is my job and these are my interests, be me".
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