Response to set reading, week 1.

The following is a reflection on some of the set reading from week 1 of Techniques and Process.

Two similar opinions with differing perspectives were offered up in the form of writings by Arnold Schoenberg and his pupil John Cage. Both discuss elements of form and organisation in composition.

Schoenberg offers us a deconstruction of the various levels of musical meaning of the word form. Relevant to his day, the hierarchical formalism to this understanding of form has devalued over the twentieth, and into the 21st century. That a piece must be of a particular form, that includes sub forms to facilitate comprehension demeans the audience. That a piece that disregards these "logical" methods of organisation must be unintelligible is old fashioned by today's understanding of the terms. However, his opinion  that a comprehensible form requires logic and coherence still holds on a deeper less genre specific level. That constructing a composition is an act of organisation through problem solving. This logic of which Schoenberg speaks in his early 20th century understanding of the act of composition isn't the same one that I hold to, but that's not to say it isn't part of the same argument. Does that mean that a poorly composed piece is one that fails to represent it's form to the listener? Is ambiguity a formal element? Does one strive to compose an "amorphous mass"? If so, there is a formal approach to it.

It is a perfectly logical process to compose in small parts and delineate a relationship from there. This is how I compose. I don't hear every note in order in my head, and simply put it down in one go. That kind of genius isn't even something I aspire to. Beginning with phrases and sound bites, or riffs, and developing them, exploring, fixing and refining these ideas is part of the process I use. Sure I conceive the piece first sometimes. Sometimes conceptually, but without a music. Mostly in words. The words dictate the form, and the approach. But sometimes there's already some musical ideas floating around. Things that, until a certain and appropriate concept forms, don't have a home. The process of composition insofar as the conceptual form of a piece is often independent of the musical composition.

Where an idea, title, story, something non-musical is the basis for exploration - we can take, for example, a piece I'm currently working on called Gyokuro - an exploration further into my personal attraction to aspects of Japanese culture, something that started long ago from reading about John Cage, and then discovering Basho and Yukio Mishima, reading about zen philosophy, Kurosawa films, and just loving the extreme diversity of Tokyo pop culture. This compositional exploration is done in by researching ideas, absorbing information and trying to encapsulate a concept concisely. An earlier piece I wrote some years ago that I called Requiem, was my first real flirt with this influence. I composed a song dedicated to a friend's band who's tour bus crashed and the singer and tour manager both died, this happened almost the same week as the singer from my old band dying in a motorcycle accident. While trying to find the right words to express what I wanted to say, I read through an anthology of Japanese Death Poems. The concept that a haiku poet, or zen monk, or really just anyone, should leave a final goodbye in the form of art is a beautiful view of the world. In the end, I adapted 3 poems from that book into the lyrics for the piece. In Gyokuro, the inspiration is from Kakuzo Okakura's The Book Of Tea, and again, I've adapted the lyrics from this text. Musically though, very little of the music relates to the book, or to the era of Okakura. While some of the melodic motives and phrases are decidedly Japanese sounding, lifted from the scales used in music like Sakura Sakura, the rest of the piece focuses around influences from J-pop and Japanese punk bands like OOIOO and Melt Banana. The idea that tea is about beauty and restraint, while Okakura, it's biggest proponent at the turn of the last century, wrote his book as a fierce attack on the western view of Japanese culture being quaint.

All this logic and formal assembly aside, the musical assembly of Gyokuro has happened independent of the conceptual. Beginning with experiments with a small music box I bought from thinkgeek.com and then promptly broke. The melody I created as a result of accidently breaking the music box became the foundation for the piano motive in the opening section of the piece, but only after a long and consuming experiment with various bell and music box sample replacements that were rejected. That rejection lead to experimentation with the sounds elsewhere, and I created an artificial Cicada sound, which became the sonic foundation of the beginning of the piece, as a nod to Basho's famous Haiku, the piano melody fitting in from there. Certain electronic experiments, some resulting in "noise" and others more "beautiful" ideas have both slowly made their way into the piece.

What Cage says about noise fascinating us is so true for me. Where in the past (and still today) artists have used "noise" elements as the sole source of their work, I prefer to marry these ideas with traditional instruments. I like seeing art and nature and technology and history, mythology, all aspects of life, come together and resonate as one. It's what I love about Bjork's Biophillia album. She has gone out of her way to highlight these relationships, quite successfully. Her new album transcends Cage's image of the future of music. Not that I think Cage was off the mark with his assessment. Considering what he knew of the world he did a good job. In particular his perspective on the future of percussion music, which if you combine that with his passion for electronics, and look at the state of popular music today, it is electronically created percussion music that is the strongest feature of today's culture. We call it "beats" now, but drum and bass, hip hop, techno, IDM, glitch, electro, whatever it is, is usually characterised foremost by the drum sounds, and particular rhythms. Dance music, whether we mean today's electronica, or bop, swing, african drumming circles, tabla music, or latin dance, the percussion, the beats is what identifies the genre/form.

With that in mind, the drum part to a song is more important that just playing a back beat, like in rock music. The sounds used and the part performed need to be as iconic/specific to the song as the melody and harmony. How many bands I saw at one music festival who all opened their sets with the same drum beat. "Oh that beat is sooo hot right now", I said. This is where the genre becomes the form unto itself, and the composer is now constructing from a template, like Schoenberg states in his exposition about dance forms, minuet etc...

The problem that Cage's view has today is that he sees these new sound/music options as having to be separate from tonal music. He seeks to free sound from western musical convention. This happened, and it was awesome. But like Bjork has illustrated in her new biophillia work, and like the science fiction authors like of the 1980/ 90's explored with cyberpunk, from William Gibson's idea of cyberspace to the Matrix, to Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan, this notion - humanity having to coexist with technology, no matter how advanced it gets, the same way we have to coexist with nature no matter what she throws at us, and how all 3 become components of our culture, and expressed as part of a story, built on history.

I used to feel like after Cage there was no point to music making anymore, because everything that could be said, he said it first. Nowadays, I feel he said a lot, and most of it was cool, but there's a new future that's beyond his vision, and that's cool too.