The Tao of Musical Intentions
Having one clear musical intention is the point
at which the blank sheet of paper, which troubles so many composers, gives way
to a succession of possibilities. The blog will refer to many famous composers
associated with particular intentions as an overlay to the main mind map. The
musical intentions have been placed into two fields, one technical and one
expressive, following the plan used in previous blogs to identify composing
errors and the elements that may form a composition.
This table follows on from the latter in
expanding the question "Is there a single musical intention to fulfill"?
The list of intentions provided may be expanded but they form a sufficiently
broad group to satisfy my requirements.
One of the issues that arise from using the
table is that once the main intention has been selected it cannot develop in
isolation, other considerations have to be heeded, but the table can be used to
generate a hierarchy of choices. Let us
take an example, silence; one intention could be to create a work which
balances sound and silence. Once that
decision is made the secondary considerations start flowing. Silence comes as a
section of the parameter 'duration' and as Cage has much to say about this
feature we can imagine his train of thought working on Imaginary Landscape No
4.
In this work one player selects the radio signal
and will as a consequence deal with definite and indefinite pitch content and
possibly rhythm and pulse. The second
player deals with amplitude and timbre in the sense of tone colour. Cage
decides to use traditional notation to provide durations to events. As in other
works chance elements are used to select values and create events, of these 64
events (I Ching has 64 events in the design of its hexagrams) half are of silence,
with the further possibility that the radio may also tune into silence. The
above considerations cover a large part of the ‘technical’ elements on the
chart.
It is not outside the realms of possibility that
Cage also considered the opposite side of the chart, the ‘poetic’ or aesthetic
intentions. There is clearly the possibility of playfulness and drama arising
from the choices. The audience may form relationships of their own between the
events heard, it would be difficult not to. The following extract is from “Cage
Talk” available to read as a PDF:
I include this reference to Imaginary Landscape
1 as it relates to the audience response in creating “their own script.”
He created a piece that was played by manipulating two
turntables.10 The role of the person who played it was to increase or decrease
the volume or to shift the speed. He wrote it up as a score. What was
intriguing for us was that it had no pulse, and we had never dealt with that
before. Since the piece was called Imaginary Landscape, there was no reason we
shouldn’t learn to work with it. We had to listen. It was played live, but
because of the turntables it had to be piped in from our radio studio, which
was attached to the theater, with the musicians in the studio. It had an
extraordinary eerie quality. The piece and the sound absolutely intrigued
people, and the audience began to build into it their own script.
As Cage wrote and spoke a great deal about his
music we are fortunate enough to have a composing intention:
“I had a goal, that of erasing all will and the
very idea of success.”
This philosophical outlook is Zen driven and
describes the decreasing role of the composer over the outcomes of the
performance. However one could argue
that Imaginary Landscape No 4 does not fully meet this intention, though it is
a concern that develops throughout his life. As for “success” there are several
recordings of the work on You Tube, the first link is set as a concert hall
performance:
this unfortunately suffers from distant
microphone recording, there is little chance to hear the events and we are given
a vague mass of sounds.
Has closer microphone work and sounds remarkable
like the Beatles Revolution No. 9. The performance starts about 1.50’ in to the
video
No video of performance but clear sound.
It is possible to relate the composing
intentions to particular composers as has been done with Cage. Here is a short list, readers might enjoy
expanding it to cover 21st century music, or indeed any period. Nurtan and I have shared some thoughts on the
matter and several of his suggestions are included:
Stravinsky covers many different intentions;
dance/drama is high among them so rhythm and pulse is a natural technical
pairing.
Berg or Schoenberg for drama / set structure,
variation
Ravel for timbre and texture / playfulness, and
this is shared by his admirer Gershwin.
Berio meaning of sounds/language (e.g. Sinfonia)
while many of the sequenzas concern themselves with particular technical
matters.
Harry Parch for tuning and colour.
Minimalist composers for repetition and hypnotic
states, but let us take Glass for repetition paired with drama for “Satyagraha”.
Dream music can be represented by George Crumb
where timbre and texture is a natural pairing from the technical side, the use
of quotation as in Dream Images being a potent force.
One could continue but for the self imposed 1K
limit!
You may have asked yourselves why Tao of musical
intentions instead of Zen. The reason is
that balance is the key element of the Tao, and it seems that finding the
correct balance between the forces that come into play in composing is
essential.
All very true indeed. Too dismissive of minimalists, it is the elephant in the world, it's not just repetition whatsoever. Part hates the term but he plays with minimalism as fluently as a more traditional composer might a tone row or harmonic progression.Tavener of course and Nielsen I would hardly call stereotypical hypnotic music either. A better sense of drama would be of course John Adams Transmigration of Souls to start.Adams is a very fluent composer I think, he is minimalist on some works, but the melody,forms,etc are so broad of styles he can't fit into just one soup can label.
ReplyDeleteI love Glass myself for the things I do like, but I enjoy him a lot more if there is something for the eye.Glass works is the only thing on my mp3 for long walks. His voice is so recognizable within a minute or two of his compositions,any of them. It's like Haydn for me personally,good for a shower and coffee with the score. More entertaining with the eye than the ear.
This was a good blog, but as usual minimalism is brushed off as soho repletion and it is well past the late 60's. Those who don't play with that section of the toolbox usually don't understand it,somedays I don't either. I am on a dead end street trying to mesh some baroque and some satie type of minimalist phrasing,choppy melodic development and a little American or World folk tonalities. It is probably the worst sounding stew ever made :)
Thanks for your observations. First of all it is unfair on yourself to say that your choices make a poor stew. The point of the table is the connectedness of technical and artistic or aesthetic values, so let us say your musical intension is to explore the relationship between minimalism and world music you have both elements in balance, cultural identity and rhythm and pulse. The intention is good, it has been explored by others and deserves further exploration. What weakens the musical argument is adding more intension so and making the mix too complicated for the listener. Less is best.
DeleteI don't think that the minimalists get short change here, Cage is the ultimate minimalist, but even if we consider minimalist technique we have the hypnotic, the dramatic, repetition, rhythm pulse and duration as intentions. If I was to have selected a work to describe minimalist intentions I would have taken "Different Trains" as my example combining historic text/drama in the context of rhythmic design and texture. I love the way the title suggests different trains of thought, a subject close to my heart.
I agree with Ken on the minimalist issue and I would like to point out that intentionally or not minimalists had an enormous influence on the structure of some popullar music genres such as rap. Even with the strong disclaimer that I have a very limited knowledge of rap, the hypnotic repetition of rhythm, texture and phrasing from all (limited number) works I heard. Similar examples in popular music of circa 1960 and later suggests that minimalist compositions of circa 1955 and later definitely had a strong influence on some of the popular music of today. I think, this is natural. If one thinks critically about it, Josef Marx, Lehar, Gershwin, Porter, Coward, Lloyd-Webber to name a few are closer to Mozart (Singspiel) and Offenbach than they are to Steven Foster or Verdi or Mozart (Opera). In either case, I cannot trace the influences as a scholar or explain how this might have happened - I am neither a musicologist nor a music historian -but, I think it is there for all of us to hear.
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