Composition | Elliot Cole

Systems, Adam Stepinski: Study in Beads #2

September 29, 2008

Adam Stepinski has built a beautiful simulation of a string of beads.

It’s a great example of how meaningful, coherent complexity can emerge easily from a system when that system is ‘tense’ — interconnected, self-referential or recursive.

Imagine animating these beads by hand. It would take forever, and it would be extremely difficult to maintain a consistent logic. And forget about interactivity. It’s like writing music by sitting at the piano, trying things until something sound good, writing that down, moving to the next bar and repeating. This is the limitation of working on a low level of abstraction.

It is better to define a system: 1) define what a bead is, and (2) define its relationship to the next bead (that is, how force is transferred). Consistency is guaranteed, for any number of beads, given any input.

“System” is kind of a dirty word among composers. It is almost a trope that a composer will say “but I don’t use systems” to reassure others that their work is ‘human’ (read: agonized-over, labor-intensive == VALUABLE). A system is seen as an easy way to generate unconsidered music, and a relic of modernist intellectual self-indulgence.

It shouldn’t be. All work is done in a system, whether elegantly defined or perversely. Some don’t offer much to explore. Some sustain interest for multiple pieces. Once, a certain system of polyphony, based on observations of human cognition of dissonance, sustained the interest of both audiences and composers for over 500 years. Abstraction is a tool, and systems should be judged by their fruit.

Tumbling, Canopy: Two Studies

September 28, 2008

Two similar studies.

Tumbling was put together in one wild night last December. I’d spent all semester building some software in MAX/MSP that would, basically, slice up sound into small slivers and transpose each slice (to fit it into a scale). I should have told someone what I was imagining; they might have told me that its called ‘granular synthesis,’ its pretty much Modern Computer Music 101, and I could have downloaded a patch lickety split. Sure I had some cool stuff going on, like you could mic a speaker and use a Wii to play the feedback like a wild instrument, but I was basically re-inventing the wheel. I used it to gradually unhinge a round.

I made Canopy this morning. While I did use a little granular synthesis on the drums (this time with a patch designed by my friend Ken Stewart), the thrust of the study was another technique entirely — yet the result is similar. I set up a switch that would turn on and off the vocal tracks, and then I drove that switch with the audio from the drum track itself. When the drums were loud, the vocals turned on, and when the drums were quiet, they vocals turned off. The result is a stuttering that is both regular and erratic. It is also a study in the kind of smooth, slow transitions I’m attracted to.

I know I’m late to the game, but I’m really fascinated by that technique — using sound from one track to drive an effect on another. Our opposition between material and technique is revealed to be an artificial one. Material can be recognized to be a technique. Forms are forces. There is not a simple causal relationship between the Technique/Method/Creator and the creation — the creation itself has creative potential. When that self-referential relationship is cultivated, feedback loops begin to drive the creation with a natural momentum. When that relationship is optimized (as in Contact Improvisation), generation becomes effortless.

This is where much “process music” gets it exactly backwards. All music is process music, but “process music” effectively flattens that fertile, generative nonlinear dynamic into a one-way textile mill.

Signage, style

September 27, 2008

I’m fascinated by the eruption of homemade signs all over Houston since Ike:

‘Lines Down’ ’One way’ ’Street closed/debris’ ’Open, food’ ’Free cold beer, Centerpoint Energy Man!’

Signs direct traffic flow (streetsigns::cars / ads::eyeballs / etc.). When the city-system is stable, its signage remains mostly stable, and we grow into the illusion that the signs are all prior to the flow, designed birds-eye by dead urban planners. But flow disruptions, like this hurricane, and their concurrent signage eruptions, reveal their Escher-like interdependent-arising:

Geologic thinking would describe it as a sedimentation process. The liquid flow of traffic organizes itself around the salient features of its solid terrain (which streets are passable, which restaurants have food). But the traffic patterns are themselves salient features of their terrain, so you get a positive feedback loop — ie. it is easier to go down a path that has been gone down before (like the Colorado River, or a mental association, or that cigarette). The liquid flow solidifies on the edges, creating solid features in the landscape: paved roads, signs, habits. This is the mechanaism by which systems seek their own (dynamic) equilibrium.

Compare that to the development of musical styles. There is a liquid flow of experimentation and exploration that spreads over a terrain. That flow reveals that the terrain has certain features, unique to an individual or shared sensibility. Basins attract (attractive sounds, formal solutions…), channels direct (instrumental constraints, habits…), and peaks repel (that which is repulsive…). As those composers explore new space, the signage erupts. Every event in every piece is a street sign saying ‘road open,’ or ‘road closed,’ or ‘feed here.’ Those signs direct future exploration, and so the flow shapes its own terrain. The system tends toward an equilibrium, a common practice/canon.

Some people fight for the flow against the signs that shape it, others fight for the signs against the flow they shape. The progressive-conservative war, in the arts or wherever, is absurd. If we ever transcend the ‘petty partisanship’ of style, we might begin by appreciating that experiments and traditions are interdependently arising, just as street signs and traffic. The two form a single, miraculous gesture, drawing hands leaping from the fertile page.

Rhetoric, long-listening

April 19, 2008

My teacher, Tony Brandt, talks a little bit about ‘rhetorical reinforcement;’ that is, the alignment of phrasal, harmonic, rhythmic effects to articulate a single rhetoric. Otherwise, the discussion of rhetoric was entirely missing from my music education. This strikes me as bizarre, since it is the feature that most contributes to music making ’sense.’

It certainly trumps harmonic language. I’ve been noticing an illusion lately. Maybe some of you can corroborate. I am hearing more and more serial music as tonal. I’m using the term loosely; I suppose I mean that it sounds harmonically conceived. I hear the harmony align with rhetoric of a phrase. I hear the harmony working as harmony. This effect is particularly strong at the ends of phrases, when the final chord can really linger in my ear — it often sounds like a perfect chord for closure, and I cannot believe it was chosen out of serial necessity. I think, surely Webern cheated here.

[This is what I think is happening. First, I've been working on my listening. I'm too focused on details, and teasing out intervals, and I miss the long phrase. So I've been practicing long-listening -- don't get hung up on details, be more patient. Listen for the rhetoric. And as I let the rhetoric have more influence over what I'm hearing, it is casting harmonic detail in its own shape. If the rhetoric of a phrase creates convincing closure, the harmony I hear is one of convincing closure.]

And it certainly trumps motivic unity. How many pieces have you heard that were supposedly motivically watertight but were impossible to follow? And then compare that type of piece with these:

Brad got me hooked on Boulez, Notations for Orchestra. I don’t know enough about how they’re made; maybe they’re working motivically too, but I can’t hear them that way yet. For now they are rhetoric alone, and it is absolutely enough.

And our resident quartet, the Jasper, played Ligeti’s Metamorphosis Nocturnes last week. There’s a piece where the motivic consistency has a fantastic effect — but it is reinforced by an absolutely direct and clear rhetoric.

Who is talking about this?

Conway Organ

April 2, 2008

I’m working on a max instrument based on Conway’s Game of Life. Here’s a first improvisation. Its also my youtube debut.

Sampling

August 3, 2007

I’ve been working for most of the last year on a record with a friend. It’s hip-hop if hip-hop is an abstract machine, an operation — sampling, collage, the grid. We’ve done just what everyone else has done — performed that operation to the music we love, and shaped it around his fantastic lyrics. I talk about it like its a silly just-for-fun project, but I’m secretly as proud and excited about it as can be.

I like working with samples because they never quite fit. When I’m writing music at the page, its easy to make a phrase fit the meter, peak where it should, interact harmonically the way I want etc. It’s extra trouble not to. Working with samples is the opposite. They never behave exactly like I want them to, and so they demand solutions that stretch me. My job isn’t to Express Myself; it is to make compromises, compute optima, lots of slight-of-hand. I like that much better.

It’s of course naive of me to say writing at the page is easy. But it’s only hard (and only good) insofar as I work with the same attitude: first, freely welcome irreconcilable elements, and then struggle for an acceptable solution. Irreconcilables are the bootstraps by which we transcend.

Transcription

July 31, 2007

I’m amazed that I haven’t ever been urged to copy scores. I’ve only spent a few hours with Toru Takemitsu’s incredible string quartet A Way A Lone, and I’m startled. I feel much more conversant in his language, and much more confident at the page. If I ever teach, my students will do this. It’s interesting to copy out a stretch vertically, stacking harmonies, and then take the a stretch horizontally to feel the lines. Working at that pace, hands and ears so slow, is a much better look into the composer’s mind than listening, which changes too: even Takemitsu’s inveterate Andante now flies by my ears in a blur.

What Music Where

June 20, 2007

In music school everybody pretends that music is a thing by itself. They pretend that the concert hall is a transparent place for pure listening and the value of a listening experience depends exclusively how good the music is. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, having felt sadly unmoved and alienated by most everything I’ve put through my ears.

And then I went home to Austin for a few days. I spent some time with a group of guys who are playing guitar and writing songs all the time. Their songs are great and they sound great and I’m really impressed with them. I hope I find myself in a community like that someday. Their music brought me much more joy than anything I could think of to put on the stereo.

And then I met and hosted a house concert for (the) Giants of Gender, a really thoughtful, excellent creative-improv group from Ohio. Kate and I called everyone we knew, cooked a pile of food, and they made magic in my living room.

I’m becoming convinced that all music is socially functional, and that the social function is the seat of its power. That is to say, music (rather, the music-experience) is a vector for the replication of social norms. Every music transmits a social vision, not just in its content (comforting, challenging?) and place in the discourse (indie + Eastern Europe, Texas swing?), but also in the circumstances of its experience, which lend so much power to music that I think the two are inseparable.

We try all we can to separate the music from its setting. The iPod is the most perfect achievement of a long line of attempts to effect this divorce. But it just creates its own setting, as predictable and impenetrable as The Opera: those twin tiny universes of “anything you want, only when you want it” and “alone.” It doesn’t matter how good the music is, if it comes on a CD it transmits and cements this vision.

On the other extreme, the rock concert, and everyone else who uses it as a model. Godlike performers and unwashed masses, the clear, policed boundary between the two, the illusion of participation – deeply alienating.

Of course, setting is just one element of what music ‘says,’ and the sense of participation in a distant time and a place you get listening to your favorite record may more than make up for the isolation of your headphones at home. That sense of participation is why people love music – suburban white kids communing with their urban black counterparts (about whom they are deeply curious), university professors communing with the Long Line of Genius, hipsters and everyone else using music to more and more finely draw group-membership boundaries. Those distant communities-in-music have been deeply important for me, but you can’t cook with them. You can’t sing with them. And so what kind of community is that?
(Hakim Bey: “If my eyes are free but my nose isn’t, that’s not what I call freedom. That’s why there’s no festival in cyberspace.”)

No matter the fidelity, no matter what orchestra, the music on my iPod or concert hall will never sound as good to me as my friends singing in my living room.

[Or that time Clem led a fleet of bicycles out at midnight to the abandoned airport, out across the runway to a school-bus graveyard. He'd swept one out and filled it with candles, and then the strangest, most exciting music I will probably ever hear.]

Bang on a Can

June 10, 2007

The Bang on a Can Marathon was really disappointing. I’m sorry. I know it’s exciting that such a thing is possible. I know it signals good things for New Music, or whatever. And I didn’t go to all of it, so maybe I missed some gems. But nobody should be congratulating themselves for taking any chances. No, I take that back, I saw one brave act – Dälek, a posturing, hair-swinging hip-hop/heavy metal outfit that must have felt out of place and ridiculous up there but did their act anyway. That’s gutsy, and as alienated as I felt from what they had to say, I really appreciated them for taking that chance. Most everything else was calculated to amuse, programmed by a formula for guessing what cool might be – a grumpy hipster with a laptop and some violins – a D minor jam band with songs in five (!) and a bassoon (!!) – an orchestra with a heavy metal guitar (!!!) – Brian Eno – brake drums brake drums brake drums. Lots and lots of safe Danger Music, one dimensional, obvious, half-baked. I felt totally underestimated as a listener.

Except for the Books. I loved the Books. Go hear the Books.

That said, I think I really support Bang on a Can’s mission (as I see it) – encourage a culture of experimentation in pop music and discourage the culture of snobbery in classical music. That’s the force I’ve tried to be in my little world. But most of what I heard had none of the joy of pop, only the cool, and none of the brains of classical, only the formality.

So that’s the music. But even if the music had been incredible, the setting doomed it all. It was a huge atrium of one of the peripheral World Trade Center buildings – all glass and marble, a cavern. The sound was terrible. They fought the echoes by turning up the speakers until we all had to cover our ears sometimes (ooh, edgy). The audience made tons of noise, lots of high-heels, cell phone conversations and tour groups just wandered through. It got me thinking, and I have not stopped, about the relationship between music and its set-and-setting. Classical music depends on an atmosphere of reverence, as pop music depends on exuberance, and both were impossible here.

All of their attempts to appear legitimate – the high-profile space, the pro production, the stellar (and hip looking) hired musicians, Brian Eno – made it somehow inert, hopeless, like if the city were a drum it was a dead spot. No resonance. Very frustrating.

Grid Music

May 6, 2007

Music is too easily reduced to positive space: music is stuff, arranged in a particular order, with particular relationships. But so much of music’s effect is in its negative space — syncopation’s invisible beats, the implied harmony in a solo line, the remembered head behind a jazz solo, sonata form or Bob Dylan (or where I’m from, Townes Van Zandt), abstract and looming.

The grid, as a feature in negative musical space, is endemic to our tradition. It is traditional notation’s first axiom — to map pitch on one axis, rhythm on another, with regular intervals and a ’snap to’ default gives us enormous leverage to understand and organize, just as perspective revolutionized painting, and the Cartesian plane revolutionized, by way of mathematics, most everything we do. It’s all one idea.

It makes me uncomfortable, though, when I’m writing music without a pulse. It feels unethical, somehow, to start the page “quarter equals sixty” and then fill it with ties, fives, threes, grace notes, dotted, shifted, irregular everythings. And it comes out sounding stiff — I can hear the grid in there, despite what I’ve done to hide it. I’ve posed this question of conscience to my teachers, and I’ve often gotten some variation of Stockhausen’s response — I’m thinking of the story where Stockhausen is shouting at Morton Feldman that he “cannot live in the sky:” a sound either lands (while pounding time on the table) “here, here, or here.” I disagree. Who the hell are you? Where did you come from? And why are you pounding the table through my piece?

I’m not arguing that it’s a prison. That’s an old saw — most every composition teacher I’ve had has told me, at one time or another, to scoot this over an eighth, tie it over the barline, and hip people everywhere groan about obvious beats. And there’s plenty of unabashedly gridded music that’s fantastic too.

But the grid — the idea of the grid — has changed. The parade of ideas that gave it to us has moved on, and we should pause to consider the consequences.

Traditional notation locks us into a Euclidean geometry in that it is based on an immobile, transcendent frame of reference (give me a place to stand and I will count to four). To describe any form, you need to embed it in a larger box with fixed values (pure invention) and plot it according to correspondences between the two. Eventually, this method proved unsatisfactory to mathematicians who, like me, probably felt a little guilty about depending so heavily on something so arbitrary. We were all eventually liberated from that box by Gauss and then Riemann, who invented a way to describe forms without it. As I understand it, they used a continuum of differential equations to describe change from one point to another as the form is traversed. Bingo — we can exhaustively define anything by relating all of its points to one another — no grid.

[Almost a century later Schoenberg introduces his method of composing with "all twelve notes related only to one another." I'll have to think about it for a while, before I get too excited, but what an analogy! Only his grid wasn't the grid, it was tonality. Taken together these describe a kind of liberation strategy.]

Then, working out Riemann, Einstein: matter curves space. IF you were to draw a grid, its lines could not be perfectly straight. They cannot be indifferent to what they traverse. Motion too, will warp even the emptiness around it.

While I don’t think we are required by Progress to imitate science, I do find it beautiful that ideas transcend discipline, and I think connections like these are worth pursuing. It’s not clear how to begin applying this to music. I suppose one route is Riemann’s escape — find a way to describe the shape and placement of sounds through self-reference. Goodbye notation as we know it. Another approach would grant a grid but allow it to be warped by the music embedded in it, just as it shapes that music. It would require a new musical math, a counterpoint of space.

Counterpoint already does all this, just on a different scale. In counterpoint, every change shapes the environment that shaped it — general relativity. Events don’t warp the pitch/rhythm grid, but they do warp the grid that describes each line’s possible paths. It’s a nonlinear dynamical system, de Landa would say, and, as such, is an organically generative machine (like Contact Improv). I want to apply the same to the physics of music. (See Sower) An explosion in the brass? How could the winds not be shaken from their tune?

Two Routes to Unity

May 3, 2007

1. A few materials subjected to many transformations.

We hear a lot about this one. In school, economy is paramount — everything must be connected to one chord, one melody. It doesn’t seem to matter whether these connections are audible. If they’re on the page, you can’t argue — they’re coming into your ears. It adds up to a kind of modernist’s mysticism: you can’t hear its unity, but once you know its there, can’t you feel it?

This feeling of unity is faith, though few would call it that, and it profoundly shapes our listening. Analysis class turns out to be primarily a faith-raising exercise — Boulez sounds illogical doesn’t he? Well look, he’s not! The details tend to not be important except in that they demonstrate a Deep Unity and Serious Intellectual Rigor, (and we’re easily impressed). Put it back on the stereo and, if we bought the analysis, we listen differently, reverently, trying to be open to the Mystery as it pours in.

It’s a rare thing to get to be both a humanist and a mystic. I think that’s probably why I’m drawn to it. But there are a lot of problems with this model, specifically hylomorphism and essentialism, which I’ll outline soon.

2. Many materials subjected to few transformations.

This approach is very exciting to me and, as far as I can tell, underexplored. Transformation is the foreground — the materials are irrelevant except that, in passing, they describe unseen forces. The music is a river or a whirlwind; leaves, dirt, houses may pass through them, but it doesn’t matter which. They can be in any order, have come from any place. All that matters is that they help reveal the whirlwind’s form. It’s the ‘melting pot’ — unity isn’t in the ingredients, its in the fact they’ve all been melted.

Some material can be a description a force — dirt is great for a whirlwind, anvils are not. But a diversity of materials is best. We need to see the behavior of both dirt and an anvil to know the extent of the whirlwind’s power. The greater the variety of materials, the better they describe the unseen force. As a result, it ‘works’ differently than other music. It works exactly like Contact Improvisation, in which coherent dances are effortlessly created by funneling all freedom through a single constraint.

(This is how I hear James Dillon, and why I’m wild about his music. The details are chaotic but the forces acting on them are clear, effortless to follow.)

So this music’s form and construction is in its negative space. The positive space — the sound — spontaneously takes on forms generated by (but not simply the inverse of) the negative space.

I suppose you could say that this is how the Boulez-types construct — the method-machine is the negative space and the music is what happens when you turn it on. But there is a distinction to be made: while the sonic matter of the piece may be an accurate product of the method’s generative forces, it does not necessarily follow that they are meaningful description of them.

To be a meaningful description of forces, the forces have to be recoverable — if you listen and find it impossible to meaningfully abstract, if you cannot take a derivative and see a line — there has been a rupture, a disunity, between the form of the music and the form of the music’s source. This position takes too small a view of music. It’s like studying an animal but ignoring its environment. We should take the larger view. Unity isn’t a function of numerical correspondence, motivic development, thematic return, arc shape — although these all may be evidence for it. Unity is continuity between a form and the forces that formed it.

And we learned everything we know about forces from our bodies.

Real Estate Roller Coaster

April 24, 2007

Of all of the different ways to model information, the best are the ones that take advantage what we do well. We don’t process lists of numbers well. We do, however, process huge amounts of spatial and physical information every moment. So if a model lets the body do the processing, it has an enormous advantage.

The obvious disadvantage is that the information is unquantifiable — no numbers. But quantity is just a little slice of the pie. It has all the allure of real knowledge but is often just a smug substitute. [I suppose this is what Serres is on about - his contempt of geometry is making a little more sense to me.] We always need to draw trends from numerics and embody them somehow in order to grasp their consequence. Graphs are necessary. If they’re not drawn for us, we draw them in our heads — it’s going up, going down, it’s smooth, it’s striated. And to identify that embodiment is our primary strategy is to realize how little we’ve tapped that resource. A graph appeals to our understanding of space without actually touching our bodies. Imagine if it did –

Other examples coming to mind: the method of loci, video games, conducting, music by James Dillon.

Clarity, Service

April 13, 2007

Though I’ve been aware of Contact Improv since high school, when I was part of Austin Bodychoir, and I know its old news to many, I’m rediscovering it now.

A CI dance is subtle, complex, full of ideas, rich in significant detail, unpredictable, surprising and utterly beautiful — while at the same time remaining completely transparent. No event is unjustified, and every justification is self-evident. All is revealed.

Every moment is meaningful, and that meaningfulness is achieved effortlessly: without a choreographer, without themes, without motives, without repetition, without reference, without set, characters, costumes, allegory; without a minimum-education requirement for the audience (and, by extension, without the arts archipelago; institution, lineage.)

This is staggering. Themes, motives, repetition, self-reference, concealment of form and minimum-education requirements – in music, bread and butter. Concealment was the power play of modernism — “You can’t hear it, but it’s totally organized,” we are promised. We gravitate to a handful of Geniuses — not because they aren’t pulling the wool over our eyes — but because we have faith that they are not taking advantage of us when they do. And though we’re finally thrown clear of the modernism train wreck, we still fetishize concealment.

I absolutely do. My writing is full of things you won’t hear but Are There. And in my listening too, I love to be disoriented; to not Get what I believe is inside. It reminds me of myself as a child, fantasizing deep, invisible significance into everything. Music without motives or repetition — fine — but if you tell me that a piece is totally clear, totally obvious, accessible to every audience, I’m probably not interested.

And yet CI has all of my interest. Why is this?

The accessible, the obvious — they aren’t what turns me off. The way they are achieved does. The Moral from the Megaphone, or the Feeling You Want To Communicate, declaimed from above and loudly, as to a foreigner — “AM I MAKING MYSELF CLEAR?” — I don’t want to be spoken to that way, especially in music. If you have Something to Say to me, use English; its a fine language and I’m fairly good at it. But don’t make me sit through your show.

A CI dance achieves its clarity honestly, humbly — in the same way it achieves its form, detail, drama, beauty. They are not the goal. Dancers are engaged in an act of service, not Artistry. When beauty emerges, no one can claim responsibility; they are only responsible for physics, anatomy, and their point of contact. They are like scientists with a beautiful theory — sure they wrote the paper, but the universe did all the work.

Contact

April 11, 2007