Listening to the colour of music. We started with an analysis exercise this week, for a track called Lera by Autechre. A disjointed piece of glitchy beats, noise, detuned blips and drones. Listening to the piece critically in terms of colour and form, we draw a pretty strange picture, as the rhythmic shapes and lines - lets say, the geometry - of the piece don't form any solid shape. By this I mean the piece doesn't connect structurally the way a dance/popular music piece is expected to. There's no loops, no repeated pattern or groove. Autechre pretty much establish something and deconstruct it immediately. The colours that fill the spaces in amongst the lines are off hues, almost like watered down ink blots, seeping into paper, or oil dropped in water. The use of static/noise elements in place of harmonic instrumentation adds a feeling of rearrangement, like shuffling the pages of a newspaper around.
We followed it up with Run The World by Beyonce. To begin with, lets comment on that soaking wet snare drum in the intro: WOW. The piece is mostly build with vocal and percussion layers, with elements of noise (similarly to Autechre) shuffling/colouring in the geometry of the vox/snare drums. I totally rate Beyonce.
The track by My Bloody Valentine that we listened too (I missed the title) seems atypical of what I could find online of their work. Everything I found seemed to be pretty conventional rock. The track we heard in class was like rainbow static, distortion with hints of pitch. I really responded to this piece visually. Like something by Fennesz, I loved the use of noise, but felt that this music needed something cleaner in amongst the dirt to really sound complete. I think I prefer things mixed up like that, for example, when Fennesz works with David Sylvian, The clean, perfection of the vocals over the "noise", connects the music with the listener more directly. Maybe. I don't know. Just writing that leaves a dirty taste in my (fingers) mouth. Like I said, I responded to My Bloody Valentine positively and with - a mass of colour in mind - strong visual connections.
I'd like to talk about Scott Walker and Einsturende Neubauten together. Mostly because they both did similar things for me. I don't really aspire to this kind of thing, but I like what they're about. There's a complete disregard for what's considered as "right" in music production. I really respect that. With regard to Scott Walker, It's Raining Today, beautiful orchestrations, I loved that. It's totally something I do. That suspended dissonance, colouring in the sound. I didn't enjoy the gospel piece as much, but where he's coming from is still really interesting. Comparatively, the Einsturende Neubauten was kind of annoying, and off-putting, but in really interesting ways. The vocals were a particularly clever technique. I felt the whole piece to be a bit contrived. In retrospect it reminds me of Anthony Coleman's version of Gainsbourg's Ce Mortel Ennui (can't find a link as yet), the way the vocals are right up in your face, and the noisy colours of instruments punctuate it, but everything is about soft/gentle themes. I think the literal use of silence was what blocked me to really enjoying the piece.
Klagfarbenmelodie. Continuing a melody across different voices. Jumping from sound to sound, seems erratic and blotchy at first, until the colours blend together, and the really cleverness of the piece takes form. I like it a lot. I'm going to explore it in my own work. In a way this music sounds a bit Looney Tunes. It's likely that Carl Starling was probably influenced by this music. It's incredibly rich with colour. Lots of sounds are happening, and what's really going on, our perception of what we're refering to as "colour" is really just contrast. The tonal contrast gives the sounds a sense of hue against other sounds. These colours wouldn't be vivid on their own, but their relationship within the piece causes vibrations that generate hue. I'm not saying monophony = monochromatic. But in essence, sound needs context before it has colour. Just like a C on it's own doesn't tell us what key we're in until we hear it in context with the rest of the harmony, a pizzicato string on it's own doesn't represent any specific colour until we hear it unfold in context with the rest of an ensemble. I'm not going to try and argue about what colours correspond to what sounds or notes, because that kind of synaesthetic experience is subjective. My point is the vibrations, the tones and hues are generated in a context, and the same sound can colour two pieces differently.
As a final reflection on the class, specifically on the in class task of analysing the synchresis of sound and vision, I must say I loved the piece we looked at, and felt that the 3 of us did a great job of describing it. Mothlight was the title of the film, and the noisy, screechy piece James selected to play with it was a gorgeous accompaniment. The relationship reflected insect nature, and the television static like flashes of imagery with the almost static noise of the track was a great combination. As the colour revealed itself in the video, I found myself hearing new things in the sound. The vision really influenced the listening experience. I liked the film a lot. It reminded me of some Man Ray films, but the fragile beauty of the moth wings on the film gave the otherwise dissonant, or perhaps "ugly", surface nature of the work a natural world connection that made it more pleasant as piece went on.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Pre-class response to set readings/listening - Spectral Music - week 4 T&P
I've never heard this term before, "Spectral Music". The description in the introductory chapter certainly makes it sound interesting. Such a great way to think about tonality/harmonic movement, and by adding timbrel development to the mix, and playing with colour in a way that is usually reserved for melody/harmony, well that's very interesting to think about.
The first of the listening pieces is Lux Aeterna by Gyorgy Ligeti. This piece is probably best known for it's use in 2001: A Space Odyssey, during the "trip" scene. An amazing piece. I've always been fascinated with the vocal timbre, and I've never been able to relate it to anything else. Listening to it in context with spectral music I notice that the timbrel variations in each register resonate, or vibrate, at different relative speeds, which I guess could be due to a serial harmonic relationship. I was aware of Ligeti's concepts of micropolyphony, and his use of cluster chords, and I always related that to colour effect of this piece, and it's relationship to the colourful visuals from Kubrick's film, that I so obviously associate with the piece.
I don't know anything about Gerard Grisey. but I love this music. The harmonic/timbrel interplay, and all the weird overtones make for a sharp, electric kaleidoscope of sound colours. I'm particularly fond of the violin passage towards the middle/end. Some really interesting phrases and timbrel expressions coming from the instrument. It's interesting to me, after the first part of the reading, that the listening excerpts are acoustic chamber music. I was expecting synthesizers, or more electronic sounds. The tones and colours emanated from these two works are a staggering display of what good instrumental players are capable of generating from their strings, or brass, etc. It's like being trapped in the future sometimes, always thinking in terms of today, and the tools we use now. When really, the electronic tools of now are merely digital representations of the great things about the tangible side of music making history.
Scelsi is another composer who's name I'm unfamiliar with. The piece in the listening has way more going on than the reading excerpt would suggest. The use of varied dynamics and timbre are obvious characteristics, the micro tonal movement and micro-harmonic layering is ear bending, and really messes with the tone of the notes. Probably one of the best things I've heard in ages actually. This is something I tried to play with a lot on my new music to fall asleep to... record. sustaining long notes or clusters on an analogue synth, and slowly moving one of the oscillators tiny bits out of tune, varying little elements of filters on parts of the sound. The idea there being something with a dreamlike, forgettable, yet totally affecting quality. Scelsi's music also reminds me of some Xenakis music for cello and clarinet I saw performed, that uses a similar idea of out of tune unisons to create micro rhythms in the beating of frequencies. That piece also contained a timbrel exploration that occurred through the sustained, detuned notes.
The first of the listening pieces is Lux Aeterna by Gyorgy Ligeti. This piece is probably best known for it's use in 2001: A Space Odyssey, during the "trip" scene. An amazing piece. I've always been fascinated with the vocal timbre, and I've never been able to relate it to anything else. Listening to it in context with spectral music I notice that the timbrel variations in each register resonate, or vibrate, at different relative speeds, which I guess could be due to a serial harmonic relationship. I was aware of Ligeti's concepts of micropolyphony, and his use of cluster chords, and I always related that to colour effect of this piece, and it's relationship to the colourful visuals from Kubrick's film, that I so obviously associate with the piece.
I don't know anything about Gerard Grisey. but I love this music. The harmonic/timbrel interplay, and all the weird overtones make for a sharp, electric kaleidoscope of sound colours. I'm particularly fond of the violin passage towards the middle/end. Some really interesting phrases and timbrel expressions coming from the instrument. It's interesting to me, after the first part of the reading, that the listening excerpts are acoustic chamber music. I was expecting synthesizers, or more electronic sounds. The tones and colours emanated from these two works are a staggering display of what good instrumental players are capable of generating from their strings, or brass, etc. It's like being trapped in the future sometimes, always thinking in terms of today, and the tools we use now. When really, the electronic tools of now are merely digital representations of the great things about the tangible side of music making history.
Scelsi is another composer who's name I'm unfamiliar with. The piece in the listening has way more going on than the reading excerpt would suggest. The use of varied dynamics and timbre are obvious characteristics, the micro tonal movement and micro-harmonic layering is ear bending, and really messes with the tone of the notes. Probably one of the best things I've heard in ages actually. This is something I tried to play with a lot on my new music to fall asleep to... record. sustaining long notes or clusters on an analogue synth, and slowly moving one of the oscillators tiny bits out of tune, varying little elements of filters on parts of the sound. The idea there being something with a dreamlike, forgettable, yet totally affecting quality. Scelsi's music also reminds me of some Xenakis music for cello and clarinet I saw performed, that uses a similar idea of out of tune unisons to create micro rhythms in the beating of frequencies. That piece also contained a timbrel exploration that occurred through the sustained, detuned notes.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Of Form & Function 2: Relfections on in class listening. Week 3 T&P Part 3
It was great to begin the set of pieces for listening/analysis with Fennesz. As a big fan of Christian Fennesz's work, it helped contextualize the whole focus of the class right away. Being asked to listen to music in a critical way is made easier when you begin with something familiar. The piece we heard was Before I Leave from Fennesz's album Endless Summer, a record that has such an incredible effect on me, an influence on the way I approach sound, guitar playing, remixing, pretty much everything. In fact, I can say that about his entire body of work, his solo work, the collaborative stuff with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and with David Sylvian especially. I've never really looked into his process, in terms of gear or software etc, but his approach to sound, in particular his approach to noise, and it's place/context within the world of music has been something I've, let's say, ripped off in my own music. What I like about his music is that he makes static and distortion and other "noise", and makes you hear them in a soothing, melodic context. The world is full of noise, and it is full of beauty, and Fennesz makes us aware of them as equal, connected parts of the same world. Before I Leave stands out on Endless Summer insofar as it is the more rhythmic piece from the record. When I say rhythmic, it is because the essence of the piece involves micro loops of different content, that create an almost skipping cd effect, or similar to a plug-in with Ableton Live called Beat Repeat. It's as if there is a sweet ambient sound piece going on, but we're hearing it in tiny looped chunks. The form of the work is simple, there's a chord progression, with lots of variation in the timbre, and each looped chunk plays for roughly the same amout of time. Sometimes the loops feel longer or shorter, but it's an illusion created by the loop points being off center with the sound fragments. So the function of the repetition in this work is to make something static into pulse, and then to use the inaccuracy of the loop points to create variations within the pulse, and thus create a natural, human effect/emotion/narrative in/of the piece.
It's interesting and difficult to discuss form when speaking of loop based music. When you look at say, Beethoven, it's easy as there's movements and modulation and lots of phrases that can be grouped in certain ways. Or when you look at jazz, and early pop music, there's verses and choruses and bridges, middle eights. Looking at music like Before I Leave makes you turn on you sonic microscope (oh, the Doctor Who imagery that implies), and you have to listen for form in other places. At least with Fennesz there's a sense of harmonic/melodic progression that can be followed, and repeats recognised, but that brings me to the next piece we listened to in class, by the group Pan Sonic. A minimal synth piece, it follows a predictable pattern of building and layering, with a new sound coming in every 8 counts, there's long sounds and short sounds, long bass drones that cycle through their pitch material half the time to the rumbling sound that opens the piece. A high VCF sprinkler effect that acts as a faster, almost hi-hat part. Everything is pulsating, and when things get dense enough, parts drop out, then come back, the variation of layers becomes the form of the piece. But Pan Sonic are much more elegant and complex than just that. Where the function of the repetitive layers develops the piece through variation of dynamics and textural layers, there's a slowly building layer of sustain rising up beneath the piece. The tension it develops as it coincides with the progression of layering, pushes the music up and over the top. It's a much more interesting sound than simpler minimal (techno) music that uses only the add and subtract process. In this piece by Pan Sonic, the form is articulated differently to Fennesz, but it's use of repetition is the same. Both use the repetition as the pulse/rhythmic function, but where Fennesz has a form built on a progression of tonal material that has it's own development and repeats, and is texturally (more or less) monophonic (although there are complex elements like the different frequencies of static within each sound fragment, the layers cut from one to the next, not overlapping like the latter piece), the Pan Sonic music is built from polyphonic textual density, and a dynamic build across the whole piece which gives it a single form, from start to end without a repeat.
When I think of form, and what it means, it's really hard to break away from the classic definition, as described in the week 1 reading chapter by Schoenberg. I don't know why. I guess I'm a structuralist at heart. I like to have my beginning and middle and end, I like to have narrative, I like things to be clear. I'm also a bit of a surrealist (or let's say, fan of surrealism), and so the music I make is more of an imagined structuralism. Maybe it's because I'm a product of too much fantasy and scifi escapism. I want a story, but I want to escape reality at the same time. I want to be able to follow the form, but I want to get lost in it too. Like lucid dreaming. To use one of my own pieces as an example of what I mean, Girl In The Grip Of The Octopus, which I played to the class last week. The piece has definite sections, and their relationship is apparent across all the musical elements, but the way they connect is amorphous, until the end when the rhythm has built up and solidified itself. While the narrative of the form isn't following and predictable convention, it's still there and easy to follow. Like looking at a Magritte, or Dali painting, where all the elements are what they are, but the context is unusual. It's interesting to add, that this piece is also a good example of my "ripping off" of Fennesz, in the melodic-noise style of the opening soundscape.
So can we apply the notion of organicism to the music discussed above? It's pretty easy to surmise each piece. In fact playing a brief excerpt of either would be enough to give you the full idea, but is it fair to reduce music like this? It may be a functional way to analyze, but does it give true representation of the music's journey. I don't know if organicism can represent a piece's emotional content. In the case of Fennesz, if we were to just hear a 5 second fragment, we'd probably only take it as a CD skipping. The emotional journey is lost. Like waking up and only remembering a few images of your dream, you can remember how it felt, but when you try to describe it, these tiny fragments of images do little to help convey the same feeling. I implied in my last post that I saw organicism as a subconscious element of a compositional process. Perhaps by doing things consciously the music could lose it's dream-like quality. This could be how process music, and minimalism differ from my more dreamlike structures. I had a chat with a friend at school (Tash from my art history tutorial) who said she liked my intros the most. She said she didn't like surrealism (unprompted, which was cool, because she obviously got what I was about) and would have liked it better if the intros just kept going, admitting she prefers minimalism as a process. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. I'm not upset about it, in fact that's not what I mean. What I mean is, I'm not sure how I feel about the music having to function as one or the other. In the process of composition for something like Girl... there was lots of minimalist techniques and things that could be called process music. I generally use those as experiments to find interesting new sounds or parts that I can then apply to the form more consciously to paint the picture. I don't think the parts, or indeed the processes on their own are enough, and I like to think of my own music as more thoroughly constructed. Sure there's the methods in which I distill everything down, as I mentioned earlier, but that distillation isn't the music, it's merely how I refine the themes and connect the dots. I certainly am not interested in making music like the violin piece by Peter Arblinger we listened to. I loved the concept, and the analogy of the samurai drawing his sword was a really amazing idea, that someone would create this as a performance piece is cool enough, but I'm totally uninterested in making or listening to music like this. Process music, and indeed minimalism is so academic. It comes across as a study, not an expression. Perhaps it's that paradoxical notion of loving the concept but not loving the result that brings up all the headachey thinking, and like I said, I'm still not sure how it all makes me feel. I don't know if it's even worth over-contemplating. Hang the sense of it and proceed.
The next two pieces I will talk about and compare are by Bernhard Lang, and 3/4 Had Been Eliminated. Bernhard Lang's piece is a (supposedly 3 hour long) opera (I didn't catch the title). I honestly thought for the first minute that the piece was a sample collage. Such a dense assembly of parts, and the use of micro-repetition made the piece almost completely indescribable. Looking up his work to refresh my memory hasn't helped. A piece of his called I Hate Mozart was similar to what we heard in class, but I can't tell. While the whole of the work could be described, or illustrated by a mere fragment of the piece, it's hard to tell if we're still listening to the same piece or not since the phrases and repetitions don't function regularly. That is, they repeat in irregular fashion, and create a jolting from reality. I had to look up more of Lang's work to get any kind of perspective, as we commented in class, it's so dense that it becomes forgettable. The effect of the repetition serves it's purpose, but the music itself doesn't retain any conscious tangibility. I'm Youtubing Das Theater der Wiederholungen, and even as it plays I can't follow it. I'm definitely not saying this as a bad thing. I mean, I listen to heaps of music like this, but Lang takes it to a whole new level to what I'm used to. If I was to compare it to Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, or Ruins, Boredoms, Zappa, or even Naked City and Fantomas, all of those acts have parts and songs that instantly got me hooked. I say hooked in a pop sense. Passages of music that stick in your mind, riffs or melodies that you hum along to or rock out to even after you've turned it off. This is takes that idea of collage, and overloads you with it. I love it. I've been trying to put something like this together for ages. A collection of tiny pieces that have so much going on you explode. I call the project KUNGFUEPILEPSY named after the dance moves you see metalcore kids doing at gigs nowdays (seriously, what happened to the mosh pit?) The plan has always been to construct a heap of less than a minute pieces that have so much going on they feel like an eternity. How this is going to work has been a troubling process, and originally I wanted it to be a band. Lately I've felt it'd work better as an electronic process. Pretty soon it'll be at a point where I can start putting it together, but mapping it out and figuring out the sounds is really challenging. Challenging like the experience listening to Lang's work.
On the flipside to this, we have 3/4 Had been Eliminated, a piece called Widower. An awesome post rock piece, reminiscent of stuff by Set Fire To Flames or 7 Year Rabbit Cycle. In this piece the repetition was over a much longer scale than with Lang. In fact one could stretch a similar comparison between 3/4 and Lang as Fennesz and Pan Sonic. Where Lang is looping tiny parts and cut/pasting it all together (for lack of a better description) 3/4 Had Been Eliminated develop there repetition over the whole piece, adding and subtracting parts in really interesting ways. The piece maintains it's mood and form across the whole arc, but lots still happens. It's way less dense than Lang. It a great piece in fact to compare because they're both long, and both use an element of collage in their process, but 3/4 sparseness makes it a much more enjoyable - or more so, an easier to enjoy - listening experience. The journey is followable. The shapes and colours stand out. I feel a close relationship to my piece described above. I guess the post rock genre which is often very obvious about it's long repetitive, droney sections, has kind of spawned a new spin off in the sense that bands like 3/4 are deconstructing it. I definitely (if and when I'm forced to) see my music as stemming from the post rock genre. In a literal sense of post = coming after, and taking the elements of rock music into new territory. Most of the time when the term is bandied around it's describing something like Mogwai, instrumental rock that's built on repetition and dynamic build, but I think that may have been where the description merely begins, not the extent of it's scope. There's lots of bullshit talk about genre and sub-genre, post progressive rock and whatever, and all that is totally irrelevant to me. Anyway, I loved this music and am hunting it down to add to my collection.
To summarize this analysis of form and the function of repetition, it's worth noting that while i've said above that I find it hard to break free from the classic definitions of form, listening to music, and thinking about form in process, reducing things down and how that reveals things particular to the piece has been a really challenging and enlightening experience. Things we do when we create sometimes happen without knowing or thinking of the relationship to the history of our art form. This delving in and out of the macro/micro repetitions has deepened my understanding of perhaps where my place amongst all this is headed.
As a post script, I just wanted to comment on something we only briefly touched on in class, to do with composing for live/recorded contexts, and how they might be approached differently. Where with some recorded music, and the 3/4HBE track is a clear example of this, the production is what makes it interesting, and how that kind of music can be translate to the stage. Also, with something like Lang's work, does it translate better as a performance piece, and is the meaning lost when heard on record? Most musicians are conscious that the stage and the studio are very different entities. There are things that you can't do live, just as there are things that you can't capture to tape. So does an artist today have to work in both media. As a class we're all very studio focused. I am too I guess. I have been focusing a lot of attention on writing for the live band. Where if you go far enough into the sky you'll come out underwater was mostly written in the studio, I did take performance into account, and while some things aren't performable live with the band, and other are perfectly performable, there's also an element of adjustment to some piece to get them to work across both platforms. I came to this action from a concept record I put together over 2005-7 called new music to fall asleep to (lullabies by Justin Ashworth). The idea was that people were always describing things I had been making as "beautiful" and "soothing" and "relaxing" etc, and lots of people were described listening to it when they went to sleep. So I thought I'd prompt them, and in a way pull the piss, by making an ironically titled album of ambient music. People, particularly those who reviewed it often didn't get it. Didn't get the irony, didn't listen beyond the title of the record. It's dreamy and soft, but it's not meant to be soothing. I was attacking that notion by exhausting it. However, I wanted to create some kind of live context for the project (which was really hard to do in Melbourne's noisey bogan pub world) and I quickly realised two things: 1) It's near impossible to get people to a show when you call it music to fall asleep to. 2) People tune out if there isn't something to engage them, and the most obvious things to engage a live band audience are drums and vocals. And so some of the music had to change to make it work live, and in doing so, a band, the band I later called Glasfrosch, grew from the process of change, which has developed my music to where it is now. The current direction with Glasfrosch is working on two sets of contrasting yet complimentary thematic music. One set for morning, and one set for night. The process of composition is focused dually on making the material performable live, but also on how to produce the recording s so they give something the audience wont get from a show. Since it's hard with recorded music to engulf the listener in the energy that a live show creates, it's important to create some extended experience to compensate. Or in reverse, where certain production techniques aren't possible to convey with the same clarity from the stage, it is that performance energy that connects with the audience. I think it's probably a moot point, but most of us experience this revelation early on, from seeing our favourite recording artists perform live.
It's interesting and difficult to discuss form when speaking of loop based music. When you look at say, Beethoven, it's easy as there's movements and modulation and lots of phrases that can be grouped in certain ways. Or when you look at jazz, and early pop music, there's verses and choruses and bridges, middle eights. Looking at music like Before I Leave makes you turn on you sonic microscope (oh, the Doctor Who imagery that implies), and you have to listen for form in other places. At least with Fennesz there's a sense of harmonic/melodic progression that can be followed, and repeats recognised, but that brings me to the next piece we listened to in class, by the group Pan Sonic. A minimal synth piece, it follows a predictable pattern of building and layering, with a new sound coming in every 8 counts, there's long sounds and short sounds, long bass drones that cycle through their pitch material half the time to the rumbling sound that opens the piece. A high VCF sprinkler effect that acts as a faster, almost hi-hat part. Everything is pulsating, and when things get dense enough, parts drop out, then come back, the variation of layers becomes the form of the piece. But Pan Sonic are much more elegant and complex than just that. Where the function of the repetitive layers develops the piece through variation of dynamics and textural layers, there's a slowly building layer of sustain rising up beneath the piece. The tension it develops as it coincides with the progression of layering, pushes the music up and over the top. It's a much more interesting sound than simpler minimal (techno) music that uses only the add and subtract process. In this piece by Pan Sonic, the form is articulated differently to Fennesz, but it's use of repetition is the same. Both use the repetition as the pulse/rhythmic function, but where Fennesz has a form built on a progression of tonal material that has it's own development and repeats, and is texturally (more or less) monophonic (although there are complex elements like the different frequencies of static within each sound fragment, the layers cut from one to the next, not overlapping like the latter piece), the Pan Sonic music is built from polyphonic textual density, and a dynamic build across the whole piece which gives it a single form, from start to end without a repeat.
When I think of form, and what it means, it's really hard to break away from the classic definition, as described in the week 1 reading chapter by Schoenberg. I don't know why. I guess I'm a structuralist at heart. I like to have my beginning and middle and end, I like to have narrative, I like things to be clear. I'm also a bit of a surrealist (or let's say, fan of surrealism), and so the music I make is more of an imagined structuralism. Maybe it's because I'm a product of too much fantasy and scifi escapism. I want a story, but I want to escape reality at the same time. I want to be able to follow the form, but I want to get lost in it too. Like lucid dreaming. To use one of my own pieces as an example of what I mean, Girl In The Grip Of The Octopus, which I played to the class last week. The piece has definite sections, and their relationship is apparent across all the musical elements, but the way they connect is amorphous, until the end when the rhythm has built up and solidified itself. While the narrative of the form isn't following and predictable convention, it's still there and easy to follow. Like looking at a Magritte, or Dali painting, where all the elements are what they are, but the context is unusual. It's interesting to add, that this piece is also a good example of my "ripping off" of Fennesz, in the melodic-noise style of the opening soundscape.
So can we apply the notion of organicism to the music discussed above? It's pretty easy to surmise each piece. In fact playing a brief excerpt of either would be enough to give you the full idea, but is it fair to reduce music like this? It may be a functional way to analyze, but does it give true representation of the music's journey. I don't know if organicism can represent a piece's emotional content. In the case of Fennesz, if we were to just hear a 5 second fragment, we'd probably only take it as a CD skipping. The emotional journey is lost. Like waking up and only remembering a few images of your dream, you can remember how it felt, but when you try to describe it, these tiny fragments of images do little to help convey the same feeling. I implied in my last post that I saw organicism as a subconscious element of a compositional process. Perhaps by doing things consciously the music could lose it's dream-like quality. This could be how process music, and minimalism differ from my more dreamlike structures. I had a chat with a friend at school (Tash from my art history tutorial) who said she liked my intros the most. She said she didn't like surrealism (unprompted, which was cool, because she obviously got what I was about) and would have liked it better if the intros just kept going, admitting she prefers minimalism as a process. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. I'm not upset about it, in fact that's not what I mean. What I mean is, I'm not sure how I feel about the music having to function as one or the other. In the process of composition for something like Girl... there was lots of minimalist techniques and things that could be called process music. I generally use those as experiments to find interesting new sounds or parts that I can then apply to the form more consciously to paint the picture. I don't think the parts, or indeed the processes on their own are enough, and I like to think of my own music as more thoroughly constructed. Sure there's the methods in which I distill everything down, as I mentioned earlier, but that distillation isn't the music, it's merely how I refine the themes and connect the dots. I certainly am not interested in making music like the violin piece by Peter Arblinger we listened to. I loved the concept, and the analogy of the samurai drawing his sword was a really amazing idea, that someone would create this as a performance piece is cool enough, but I'm totally uninterested in making or listening to music like this. Process music, and indeed minimalism is so academic. It comes across as a study, not an expression. Perhaps it's that paradoxical notion of loving the concept but not loving the result that brings up all the headachey thinking, and like I said, I'm still not sure how it all makes me feel. I don't know if it's even worth over-contemplating. Hang the sense of it and proceed.
The next two pieces I will talk about and compare are by Bernhard Lang, and 3/4 Had Been Eliminated. Bernhard Lang's piece is a (supposedly 3 hour long) opera (I didn't catch the title). I honestly thought for the first minute that the piece was a sample collage. Such a dense assembly of parts, and the use of micro-repetition made the piece almost completely indescribable. Looking up his work to refresh my memory hasn't helped. A piece of his called I Hate Mozart was similar to what we heard in class, but I can't tell. While the whole of the work could be described, or illustrated by a mere fragment of the piece, it's hard to tell if we're still listening to the same piece or not since the phrases and repetitions don't function regularly. That is, they repeat in irregular fashion, and create a jolting from reality. I had to look up more of Lang's work to get any kind of perspective, as we commented in class, it's so dense that it becomes forgettable. The effect of the repetition serves it's purpose, but the music itself doesn't retain any conscious tangibility. I'm Youtubing Das Theater der Wiederholungen, and even as it plays I can't follow it. I'm definitely not saying this as a bad thing. I mean, I listen to heaps of music like this, but Lang takes it to a whole new level to what I'm used to. If I was to compare it to Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, or Ruins, Boredoms, Zappa, or even Naked City and Fantomas, all of those acts have parts and songs that instantly got me hooked. I say hooked in a pop sense. Passages of music that stick in your mind, riffs or melodies that you hum along to or rock out to even after you've turned it off. This is takes that idea of collage, and overloads you with it. I love it. I've been trying to put something like this together for ages. A collection of tiny pieces that have so much going on you explode. I call the project KUNGFUEPILEPSY named after the dance moves you see metalcore kids doing at gigs nowdays (seriously, what happened to the mosh pit?) The plan has always been to construct a heap of less than a minute pieces that have so much going on they feel like an eternity. How this is going to work has been a troubling process, and originally I wanted it to be a band. Lately I've felt it'd work better as an electronic process. Pretty soon it'll be at a point where I can start putting it together, but mapping it out and figuring out the sounds is really challenging. Challenging like the experience listening to Lang's work.
On the flipside to this, we have 3/4 Had been Eliminated, a piece called Widower. An awesome post rock piece, reminiscent of stuff by Set Fire To Flames or 7 Year Rabbit Cycle. In this piece the repetition was over a much longer scale than with Lang. In fact one could stretch a similar comparison between 3/4 and Lang as Fennesz and Pan Sonic. Where Lang is looping tiny parts and cut/pasting it all together (for lack of a better description) 3/4 Had Been Eliminated develop there repetition over the whole piece, adding and subtracting parts in really interesting ways. The piece maintains it's mood and form across the whole arc, but lots still happens. It's way less dense than Lang. It a great piece in fact to compare because they're both long, and both use an element of collage in their process, but 3/4 sparseness makes it a much more enjoyable - or more so, an easier to enjoy - listening experience. The journey is followable. The shapes and colours stand out. I feel a close relationship to my piece described above. I guess the post rock genre which is often very obvious about it's long repetitive, droney sections, has kind of spawned a new spin off in the sense that bands like 3/4 are deconstructing it. I definitely (if and when I'm forced to) see my music as stemming from the post rock genre. In a literal sense of post = coming after, and taking the elements of rock music into new territory. Most of the time when the term is bandied around it's describing something like Mogwai, instrumental rock that's built on repetition and dynamic build, but I think that may have been where the description merely begins, not the extent of it's scope. There's lots of bullshit talk about genre and sub-genre, post progressive rock and whatever, and all that is totally irrelevant to me. Anyway, I loved this music and am hunting it down to add to my collection.
To summarize this analysis of form and the function of repetition, it's worth noting that while i've said above that I find it hard to break free from the classic definitions of form, listening to music, and thinking about form in process, reducing things down and how that reveals things particular to the piece has been a really challenging and enlightening experience. Things we do when we create sometimes happen without knowing or thinking of the relationship to the history of our art form. This delving in and out of the macro/micro repetitions has deepened my understanding of perhaps where my place amongst all this is headed.
As a post script, I just wanted to comment on something we only briefly touched on in class, to do with composing for live/recorded contexts, and how they might be approached differently. Where with some recorded music, and the 3/4HBE track is a clear example of this, the production is what makes it interesting, and how that kind of music can be translate to the stage. Also, with something like Lang's work, does it translate better as a performance piece, and is the meaning lost when heard on record? Most musicians are conscious that the stage and the studio are very different entities. There are things that you can't do live, just as there are things that you can't capture to tape. So does an artist today have to work in both media. As a class we're all very studio focused. I am too I guess. I have been focusing a lot of attention on writing for the live band. Where if you go far enough into the sky you'll come out underwater was mostly written in the studio, I did take performance into account, and while some things aren't performable live with the band, and other are perfectly performable, there's also an element of adjustment to some piece to get them to work across both platforms. I came to this action from a concept record I put together over 2005-7 called new music to fall asleep to (lullabies by Justin Ashworth). The idea was that people were always describing things I had been making as "beautiful" and "soothing" and "relaxing" etc, and lots of people were described listening to it when they went to sleep. So I thought I'd prompt them, and in a way pull the piss, by making an ironically titled album of ambient music. People, particularly those who reviewed it often didn't get it. Didn't get the irony, didn't listen beyond the title of the record. It's dreamy and soft, but it's not meant to be soothing. I was attacking that notion by exhausting it. However, I wanted to create some kind of live context for the project (which was really hard to do in Melbourne's noisey bogan pub world) and I quickly realised two things: 1) It's near impossible to get people to a show when you call it music to fall asleep to. 2) People tune out if there isn't something to engage them, and the most obvious things to engage a live band audience are drums and vocals. And so some of the music had to change to make it work live, and in doing so, a band, the band I later called Glasfrosch, grew from the process of change, which has developed my music to where it is now. The current direction with Glasfrosch is working on two sets of contrasting yet complimentary thematic music. One set for morning, and one set for night. The process of composition is focused dually on making the material performable live, but also on how to produce the recording s so they give something the audience wont get from a show. Since it's hard with recorded music to engulf the listener in the energy that a live show creates, it's important to create some extended experience to compensate. Or in reverse, where certain production techniques aren't possible to convey with the same clarity from the stage, it is that performance energy that connects with the audience. I think it's probably a moot point, but most of us experience this revelation early on, from seeing our favourite recording artists perform live.
Organicism - Week 3 T&P Part 2.
In this post I wanted to talk briefly about organicism as it relates to my musical process. Specifically the way I approach harmony, melodic structure in composition and improvisation. Basically I have this process, whether it's conscious or not is hard to say, where I distill everything down to really simple relationships. It's usually based on some tonal or modal base, a scale or series of notes. Then, as I progress, rather than following any traditional forms of modulation (for lack of a better term right now) I look for ways to progress harmonically, to evolve the piece, by layering keys/scales, using the original base harmony to link the relationships and make them work.
In my last post I posed a rhetorical question - So is organicism a compisitional technique? - and although I admit readily this process isn't something I've consciously developed, it appears the answer is yes. It's worth noting that what I'm really referring to here as organicism is actually something more like a dumbing down of Schenkerian analysis. I don't set about making a piece of organically structured music, but I do reduce my ideas down and then build them in ways that maintain these very basic relationships. So in that, the process becomes something that can be summarized by the smaller elements that make the building blocks of the piece.
Reflecting on this little tidbit, it makes sense now that there's something to focus consciously on in composition. There's experiments to be done now, and new things to try, and when I'm composing new pieces from now on, I'll have this in mind as I work.
In my last post I posed a rhetorical question - So is organicism a compisitional technique? - and although I admit readily this process isn't something I've consciously developed, it appears the answer is yes. It's worth noting that what I'm really referring to here as organicism is actually something more like a dumbing down of Schenkerian analysis. I don't set about making a piece of organically structured music, but I do reduce my ideas down and then build them in ways that maintain these very basic relationships. So in that, the process becomes something that can be summarized by the smaller elements that make the building blocks of the piece.
Reflecting on this little tidbit, it makes sense now that there's something to focus consciously on in composition. There's experiments to be done now, and new things to try, and when I'm composing new pieces from now on, I'll have this in mind as I work.
Of Form & Function: Organicism and Process music. Week 3 T&P Part 1.
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".
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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