Y our infectious/epidemiology model may be the first theory of canonical form that says that voices engaged in canon are passive ... coerced, so to say. As though the neighboring parts had some sort of apraxia until infected. But they are not at a loss for words. They are not passive [respondents]. And you obviously do not have anything like the release of tension, which is the conclusion of normal classical music composition structure.”
— Anonymous email to CMT.
I agree with some of the emailer’s observations about the
earlier CMT post: the players are not ‘passive’ or ‘inert’. Each is receptive to stimulation and, after being stimulated/infected by those around them, engages in ‘speculative’ or ‘expansive’ elaboration upon what they’ve received.
B ut I disagree about the ‘tension’ point. There’s no ‘law’ that says that all musical events must be deliberative or rational or intended. Individual players may emit sounds that have unintended [but wonderful—] consequences or inadvertent meanings. Players have a possibility for automatic or pre-conscious improvisational sonic production, which the composer can call upon if she/he wishes (think Stockhausen or Nancarrow or Tenney). There may be hyper-structural or obsessive features that are far from ‘rational’ (think Feldman or Babbitt or Cage). Stochastic/random elements don't mean that a piece defies analysis—only that the analytical approach has to change to address the content. It’s not a music theory dead-end.
I n fact, I think that the indeterminacy/stochastic elements tend to make the music more ‘listener-centric’ rather than ‘performer-centric’ or ‘text/composer-centric’. We are on ‘edge’ in part because of the greater indeterminacy/unpredictability that it has, compared to conventional forms. The indeterminacy itself is a kind of ‘structure’ or ‘form’. And, so long as the player or listener understands the relationships of the structures and mechanics of the thing—how the stochastic events and mechanisms fulfill the roles of themes and modulations in traditional music—then the thing can be comprehensible and emotionally accessible, just as any other piece of music is.
I suggest that Ferneyhough’s ‘Chûte d’Icare’ and other recent compositions that employ canonical structures actually do permit significant run-time indirection. Furthermore, I suggest that such compositions are analogous to social networking and micro-blogging service. Canonical-form compositions like these are neither more nor less coercive than contemporary Web 2.0 apps and the canonical exchanges that arise in those.
Y es, canonical forms are inherently replicative. This cuts out a lot of the ‘me-too’ chatter and dilatory utterances among the parts, by definition. But there is nonetheless a lot of within- and between-channel complexity. The entropy of the signals is high, even though the signals are canonically structured! And in the Ferneyhough—or in, say, James Tenney’s ‘Postal Pieces’—the parts have to decide whether to ‘resist’ or instead ‘give in’/’succumb’ to the neighboring canonical utterances/viruses. There is the text of the score, and then there is each performer’s free-will...
C learspace uses an unconventional, passive ‘friending’ model. Other users can assert themselves as your friends with or without requiring or permitting your active assent or declining. Your only choice is to remove them (socially awkward), when all you maybe want to do is clear up your “activity feeds” so that you don’t have to drink from such a big fire-hose of information when all those people who friended you generate activity that doesn’t interest you.
Facebook and other social networking apps have active/consensual assent-or-decline friending—so filtering/throttling the fire-hose is easier. In the Facebook and other active-friending apps, reciprocal friending is expected, and friend relationships are hard to break. By contrast, in Twitter the ‘following’ relationship comes without connotations of friendship (and less hesitation about unfollowing to control your attention).
W hat would be useful would be if canonical-form compositions were written like
Twitter—and offered the notion of ‘following’ a part as an alternative to ‘friending’ or passively ‘subscribing’ as in conventional canonical-form compositions. That way each performer could retain some autonomous control of her/his social filter without having to ignoring feeds or corrupting the composer’s text with individual expressions/interpretations or out-of-band [a-canonical] irruptions.
Y ou can get around this by subscribing separately to each person’s activity RSS feed, but I have found no way to easily aggregate those into a single ‘river of activity’ stream other than creating a combined folder in my feed reader. By contrast, the ‘broadcast’ nature of sound means that we automatically aggregate the acoustic feeds of the other parts around us. (With my chronic hearing loss, I just have a hard time hearing the harpsichord...)
I suppose a non-broadcast canon could be composed and performed. Actually, tape loops and other electroacoustic media are in that vein. Or we could update Tenney’s postcards, and compose a canon where each performer goes into the studio alone and lays down a single track: each person/part is entirely at liberty to listen or not listen to a headphone ‘mix’ of one or some or all of the tracks that have been recorded by other performers. Then the engineer/producer/composer do the edit and post-production. Still canonical form—only off-line!
T witter itself is a great social filter. It has ‘lower friction’ than blogging, and the 140-character limit per tweet makes it less cognitively intrusive/absorptive than blogging or RSS feeds. It’s a shared party-line, and users tend to tweet things that preserve the signal-to-noise ratio for everybody on the party-line. (If they don’t, they can be un-followed without any concern.) Like blogging, Twitter allows you to time-shift your participation (something you can’t do with IM). And like ‘Chûte d’Icare’ or ‘Postal Pieces’, it permits stochastic run-time indirection.
A bout 20% of my Twitter followers are people I know. For better and worse, the rest are a wonderfully-varied ... canonical, stochastic ... Fire-Hose...
H ow does it feel to perform ‘Chûte d’Icare’ or ‘Postal Pieces’, I wonder?
T hank you for the email, and for the privilege of exchanging ideas about these things here!
I think of ‘form’ on a larger temporal scale—as what’s called ‘content’ on a smaller scale. That old ‘form-content’ dichotomy is, to me, a spurious one, because they involve the same thing at different hierarchical levels of perception. What we take to be substance or content—say, a string quartet—is really the result of forms—formal shapes and structures at a microscopic level: particular envelopes, waveforms, and sequences of these—detailsin the signal. All ‘form’ is just the same thing at a larger level,involving spans of time over, say, five minutes or more.”
— James Tenney, interview with composer Gayle Young, 1978.
- Twitter
- Software as a Service (Saas)
- Polansky L. Early works of James Tenney. Soundings 13, ed. P Garland, 1983. [1MB pdf]
- Notes to Tenney: Postal Pieces CD at DRAMonline.org
- Barton Workshop. Tenney: Postal Pieces. (New World Records, 1971. Reissued, 2005.)
- Oteri F. James Tenney: Postcards from the Edge. NewMusicBox.org, 01-JUN-2005.
- James Tenney page at Composers21.com (not updated since Tenney's death in 2006)
- James Tenney page at PlainSound.org
- Maher C. James Tenney on intention, harmony, and phenomenology. Rhizome Cowboy interview, 1995.
- James Tenney page at Wikipedia
- Babbitt M. Canonical Form for solo piano. Edition-Peters, 1983.
- Bowkett G. Summon monsters? Open the door? Heal? Die? Bowkett blog, 21-MAY-2008. [on filtering social networking]
- Lewin D. Musical Form & Transformation. Yale Univ, 1993.
- Mazzola G, Milmeister G, Morsy K, Thalmann F. Functors for Music: The Rubato Composer System. in R Adams, S Gibson, S Arisona, eds., Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision & The New Screen. Springer, 2008.
- Reynolds R. Form and Method: Composing Music: The Rothschild Essays. Routledge, 2007. [pp. 44,52 on canon-as-algorithm for structure generation by replication/reordering]
