I actually do get asked this question about my music: "what are you most proud of?"
I can't answer that question; i usually say whichever of my albums pops into my head first, or try to guage what the questioner would be interested in hearing. But, that is not a real answer.
The truth is that i am proud of everything and nothing all at the same time. I'm proud of every single piece of music i create, because so much is thrown into the garbage during the creative process. Every piece you see in my discography represents the abandonment of countless takes and other projects. Everything that makes it throught my self editing process is me, exactly the way it is supposed to be. The frequency of my creation is at odds with what i'm doing; i have music running through my head all day every day, unused music from 20+ years sitting on my hard drive/written on faded manuscript paper/lurking in the back of my mind, waiting patiently for a context in which to manifest.
Yet, the feeling of pointlessness sits there too. The vast majority of all music and art is mindless filler. Sure, we can aim for supposed pleasure or intellectual fulfillment, but there is ultimately no clear reason for what catches our imagination or gives us pleasure. Fame is simply the coincidental appreciation of many people all at once. It makes no difference if others love/hate/ignore what i create, i have an impulsion to make whatever music flows from my fingers.
I suppose i could point out 4 albums that i feel best represent who i am: the slumlord ep, the uncollected, feeble, and album of death. I could imagine being happy if those 4 albums were my entire discography, considering that alone is more output than most bands get the chance to produce. Some musicians don't have any tangible recordings at all.
Thus, the narcissism and deprecation live side by side; i am immensely proud of realizing my goals, but ultimately uncertain about their validity.
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Monday, April 3, 2017
aleatoric music - a treatise...
The full title: aleatoric music - a treatise on compositional techniques and procedures for the practicable realization of indeterminate aural experience.
Aleatoric music is commonly defined as music in which one or more parameters of the composition remained undetermined by the composer; that is, ultimately left for the performer to decide. However, from the viewpoint of the audience, the auditory experience is fully at the determination of the performer, as the average listener has little or no basis for comparison on issues of expression, tuning, tempo, orchestration, mistakes, etc. Outside the realm of rigid integral serialism realized by computational methods. Thus, this definition of aleatory falls short of the artistic goal of various indeterminate musics.
It would therefore be better to define aleatoric music in terms of its opposition to traditional art musics. Whereas traditional art music historically seeks to converge toward the total realization of accurate performamce (oral tradition to notation to serialism, to integral serialism to computer music), aleatoric music seeks to pull back from such determinacy such that a given performance is objectively indeterminate is some way. Yet, at the same time, there must be an opposite boundary, beyond which lies fully indeterminate, chance, chaos, and meta-compositional philosophy.
Furthermore, a piece must have some recognizable identity for the average listener in spite of it's aleatory in order to be "a piece" in the traditional sense. A lack of all coherence between various performances would call the nature of the piece into question, and ultimately lack credibilty as a repeatble performance. Therefore, aleatoric music requires a written or potentially writable score that reliably documents at least 1 "unbreakable rule." That is not to say that failure to obey this rule is anachronistic to a particular piece, but that the rule must be in effect (known to both performer and listener) such that "disobedience," or better failure, are recognizable as such, if desired by either participant.
Several potential procedures come to mind immediately: what i call "music for sight reading" in which the performer must perform at sight some notated score. Such a procedure produces a satisfactory aleatoric experience for the listener by containing only one known unbreakable rule: "attempt to perform this piece of music." Even if not immediately tangible, the listener can accept the presence of consistent source material among various performances. A second category can be defined by the blatant removal of traditional performance instruction: no notated dynamics, articulations, rhythms, pitch, insttumentation, etc.
This is not a new concept, works like Bach's Art of The Fugue are defined by their lack of instrumentation, many of the piano works by Liszt and Chopin (among others) bear the marks of favoring physical/visual observable performative gestures over strict adherence to standard notated articulation. Yet, the distinction must be drawn between these proto-examples and a distinct class of aleatoric music in which the uncertainty is an intended component of the performance.
In order to build such a body of work, a composer may choose to work from small experiments toward larger solo and ensemble works, such that both the works themselves, and the repertoire built from them form an aleatoric evolution with the composer as the only unifying force. Or multiple works may take the same predetermined material as the starting point for radically different performance settings. In any case, the overreaching goal would be a more engaged audience for both live performance and recoded media. Such a project may very well help to reinvigorate the financial and creative support we as artist frequently lack.
Aleatoric music is commonly defined as music in which one or more parameters of the composition remained undetermined by the composer; that is, ultimately left for the performer to decide. However, from the viewpoint of the audience, the auditory experience is fully at the determination of the performer, as the average listener has little or no basis for comparison on issues of expression, tuning, tempo, orchestration, mistakes, etc. Outside the realm of rigid integral serialism realized by computational methods. Thus, this definition of aleatory falls short of the artistic goal of various indeterminate musics.
It would therefore be better to define aleatoric music in terms of its opposition to traditional art musics. Whereas traditional art music historically seeks to converge toward the total realization of accurate performamce (oral tradition to notation to serialism, to integral serialism to computer music), aleatoric music seeks to pull back from such determinacy such that a given performance is objectively indeterminate is some way. Yet, at the same time, there must be an opposite boundary, beyond which lies fully indeterminate, chance, chaos, and meta-compositional philosophy.
Furthermore, a piece must have some recognizable identity for the average listener in spite of it's aleatory in order to be "a piece" in the traditional sense. A lack of all coherence between various performances would call the nature of the piece into question, and ultimately lack credibilty as a repeatble performance. Therefore, aleatoric music requires a written or potentially writable score that reliably documents at least 1 "unbreakable rule." That is not to say that failure to obey this rule is anachronistic to a particular piece, but that the rule must be in effect (known to both performer and listener) such that "disobedience," or better failure, are recognizable as such, if desired by either participant.
Several potential procedures come to mind immediately: what i call "music for sight reading" in which the performer must perform at sight some notated score. Such a procedure produces a satisfactory aleatoric experience for the listener by containing only one known unbreakable rule: "attempt to perform this piece of music." Even if not immediately tangible, the listener can accept the presence of consistent source material among various performances. A second category can be defined by the blatant removal of traditional performance instruction: no notated dynamics, articulations, rhythms, pitch, insttumentation, etc.
This is not a new concept, works like Bach's Art of The Fugue are defined by their lack of instrumentation, many of the piano works by Liszt and Chopin (among others) bear the marks of favoring physical/visual observable performative gestures over strict adherence to standard notated articulation. Yet, the distinction must be drawn between these proto-examples and a distinct class of aleatoric music in which the uncertainty is an intended component of the performance.
In order to build such a body of work, a composer may choose to work from small experiments toward larger solo and ensemble works, such that both the works themselves, and the repertoire built from them form an aleatoric evolution with the composer as the only unifying force. Or multiple works may take the same predetermined material as the starting point for radically different performance settings. In any case, the overreaching goal would be a more engaged audience for both live performance and recoded media. Such a project may very well help to reinvigorate the financial and creative support we as artist frequently lack.
Saturday, April 1, 2017
notes on my 12-tone works
I have a fondness for 12-tone (not necessarily serial) composition, and there are several such pieces scattered throughout my discography. I don't follow a strict academic approach (the historical arguments for and against Schoenberg's techniques and "rules" have always seemed childish and non-productive to me). For me, given my interest in improvisation and non-rigid tonal/harmonic structures, the unique characteristics of composing from a tone row allow greater focus on gesture and sequence, as opposed to "correct" voice leading or harmonic structure. In other words, tone rows are one way to avoid getting bogged down with questions of tonal coherence and note/pitch choice; the notes simply ARE and one can focus on how to best express them.
A list:
Variations on a Tone-row
Piano Music Volume 1
Scenes from a Row
Haiku for the Seasons
Sym12 (#4 from 5 Little Pieces for Piano)
Album of Death
No More Daisies Down
NCLASP Vol. 2
Sonatina for violin and piano
I don't want to go into minute detail, but i do want to generalize how they relate to each other.
No More Daisies Down, Sonatina, and Sym12 all use the same row (57t0123468e) in various forms. Sonatina uses Sym12 as it primary section. Daisies is the first (but not the last) truly improvised piece based on a row. Each of the other pieces uses its own row in various creative and non-standard ways. I was known to use them in teaching analysis to show students how to recognize when a particular analytical procedure/system stops working and requires a different approach, but does not invalidate the original analysis (i.e. the "rules" can change without warning as a feature of the piece).
Some day i will find a simple way to make scores available without having to invest in costly self publishing or data storage.
A list:
Variations on a Tone-row
Piano Music Volume 1
Scenes from a Row
Haiku for the Seasons
Sym12 (#4 from 5 Little Pieces for Piano)
Album of Death
No More Daisies Down
NCLASP Vol. 2
Sonatina for violin and piano
I don't want to go into minute detail, but i do want to generalize how they relate to each other.
No More Daisies Down, Sonatina, and Sym12 all use the same row (57t0123468e) in various forms. Sonatina uses Sym12 as it primary section. Daisies is the first (but not the last) truly improvised piece based on a row. Each of the other pieces uses its own row in various creative and non-standard ways. I was known to use them in teaching analysis to show students how to recognize when a particular analytical procedure/system stops working and requires a different approach, but does not invalidate the original analysis (i.e. the "rules" can change without warning as a feature of the piece).
Some day i will find a simple way to make scores available without having to invest in costly self publishing or data storage.
my approach to ambient looped guitar
In my last post, i mentioned that the individual pieces are often improvised during the recording process. But, i also want to preserve a similarity between pieces composed with the same "recipe." If you've listened to multiple albums, you most likely thought that, for example, save us from someone, dreaming down a half-step, and the whole sounds you can make album all sound very similar. Part of that similarity is harmonic, but part of it is also their shared method of construction. I use a lot of variation within the process, but the overall recipe is always the same:
1 - choose a complex sonority (a chord, or a cluster of notes that form a harmonic backdrop), and a scale or mode to work from over that sonority
2 - create a looped background (usually non-metrical and impossible to tell where the loop point actuall is; unless there is a consistent rhythmic phrase like morning coffee or girl with the pearl)
3 - improvise one or more lead parts over that background loop.
If you opened most any of my ardour sessions you would most often find only 2 tracks: "rhythm" and "lead." Some of the looped pieces are 1 continuous take (built from the ground up all in one go), but that can be really frustrating on bad days, so i generally build a "rhythm track" then solo over it.
For me at least, i find the first thing that comes out of my head and fingers is the most interesting/pleasing/creative thing to work with, whereas laboring over an idea or structure in a more traditional way produces boring predictable music that i am less likely to actually finish. If nothing is flowing, i just walk away and come back later.
All of this is not to say that i sit down at the computer and noodle around for 45 minutes and mix every sound i produce down into a mindless 3 minute track. Rather, i compose and edit the same way anyone would, i just try to condense that process into a short and efficient workflow that eliminates all of the second guessing or needless sound tweaking. Sometimes the results are mediocre, terrible, or fantastic, but my goal is to finish the piece as quickly as possible, not to be the most awesome artist/guitar player/composer ever.
I make a plan, i execute it as best as i can, and i let the end result be what it is: eventually everything finds or inspires a suitable context for itself.
Some tracks come together right away, some take multiple sessions, or mulriple days. I've found myself in the middle of recording 8 or 9 different things at the same time, and feeling very lost. So, my only goal is to try to finish 1 thing every session (i could have anywhere from 1 to 8 or 12 sessions in a single day). The "thing" could be coming up with a catchy riff, creating a looped background, recording two bars of a solo line, mixing two or three parts, whatever. Once that thing is finished i either walk away, or move on to another thing i know i can finish. I never waste time on sething that just isn't clicking, and it lets me get a lot more done. Whether it's "good" or other people like it isn't really the point.
1 - choose a complex sonority (a chord, or a cluster of notes that form a harmonic backdrop), and a scale or mode to work from over that sonority
2 - create a looped background (usually non-metrical and impossible to tell where the loop point actuall is; unless there is a consistent rhythmic phrase like morning coffee or girl with the pearl)
3 - improvise one or more lead parts over that background loop.
If you opened most any of my ardour sessions you would most often find only 2 tracks: "rhythm" and "lead." Some of the looped pieces are 1 continuous take (built from the ground up all in one go), but that can be really frustrating on bad days, so i generally build a "rhythm track" then solo over it.
For me at least, i find the first thing that comes out of my head and fingers is the most interesting/pleasing/creative thing to work with, whereas laboring over an idea or structure in a more traditional way produces boring predictable music that i am less likely to actually finish. If nothing is flowing, i just walk away and come back later.
All of this is not to say that i sit down at the computer and noodle around for 45 minutes and mix every sound i produce down into a mindless 3 minute track. Rather, i compose and edit the same way anyone would, i just try to condense that process into a short and efficient workflow that eliminates all of the second guessing or needless sound tweaking. Sometimes the results are mediocre, terrible, or fantastic, but my goal is to finish the piece as quickly as possible, not to be the most awesome artist/guitar player/composer ever.
I make a plan, i execute it as best as i can, and i let the end result be what it is: eventually everything finds or inspires a suitable context for itself.
Some tracks come together right away, some take multiple sessions, or mulriple days. I've found myself in the middle of recording 8 or 9 different things at the same time, and feeling very lost. So, my only goal is to try to finish 1 thing every session (i could have anywhere from 1 to 8 or 12 sessions in a single day). The "thing" could be coming up with a catchy riff, creating a looped background, recording two bars of a solo line, mixing two or three parts, whatever. Once that thing is finished i either walk away, or move on to another thing i know i can finish. I never waste time on sething that just isn't clicking, and it lets me get a lot more done. Whether it's "good" or other people like it isn't really the point.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)