books

Another snippet from Curtis Roads' book Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic, on the topic of the conventionality of Western melodic forms:

Conventional classical and popular styles exhibit a great deal of redundancy in melodic patterns (i.e., parts of many melodies are identical). The tendency of composers to borrow or reinvent an existing tune has been long studied by musicologists. As Thomas Alva Edison (1917) once observed: "I had an examination made of the themes of 2700 waltzes. In the final analysis, they consisted of 43 themes, worked over in various ways." [citations omitted]

You gotta love that hubris of the dilettante one-percenter: "I had an examination made..." What are servants for, after all. If only Bill Gates would examine 2700 waltzes instead of mucking about in charter schools; the world might be a better place. He could even have interns doing it.

Am continuing to read Curtis Roads' book Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic. He has this to say about conventional Western harmony:

A formidable advantage of 12-note ET [equal temperament] over its predecessors was the equality of its intervals. For example, an ET “perfect” fifth interval will sound equivalent no matter which pitches are used to form it; this is not generally true of non-ET tuning systems. Such flexibility means that a composer can write functionally equivalent melodies and chord progressions in any key. It also enables harmonic modulation (i.e., a transition from one key to another by means of a chord common to both). The same flexibility fostered the rise of atonal and serial music and the promulgation of increasingly abstract operations on pitch class sets.

The mother lode of 12-note ET has been mined for 500 years by millions of musicians in innumerable compositions. The tuning is so ingrained that it is virtually impossible to musically express anything new about it. Consider a work for piano; it is constrained by its tuning and timbre from the start. If it is to find novelty, it must seek them not in tuning or timbre, but in other aspects of the composition. This is not to say that it is impossible to express anything new with 12-note ET. However, the new thing is not about the tuning. Rather, the novelty lies elsewhere, for example, in a new interpolation between existing genres, an unusual rhythmic organization, an atypical formal structure, a fresh combination of timbres, a philosophical message, etc.

The pop music industry sometimes manufactures songs that are attractive despite the use of 12-note ET in worn-out harmonic and rhythmic formulas. Yet some combination of elements in the voice, lyrics, audio production, fashion, face, camera angle, lens, setting, hairstyle, body language, stage show, animation, or attitude spawns mass fascination. The familiar melodic and harmonic formula—like the formulaic beat—serves as a comfortable backdrop.

Another excerpt from Curtis Roads' recently-published book, Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic (Oxford, 2015):

[Gérard] Grisey based his rhythmic theory on perception, rejecting approaches based purely on simple mathematical abstractions such as prime numbers, Fibonacci series, and so on. He did not reject mathematics, but he felt that algorithms needed to take perception into account. As he pointed out, in Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1957) for three orchestras, the work’s rhythmic structure is highly organized in terms of tempi but unfathomable to the listener:

The tempi have great structural importance. Who perceives them?
—GRISEY (1987)

Grisey took issue with rhythmic abstractions promoted by the integral serialists, who were strongly influenced by Messiaen’s book Technique de mon langage musicale (1944). One of the techniques described by Messiaen was non-retrogradable rhythm, or rhythmic palindrome (figure 6.4). He defined these as follows:

Whether one reads them from right to left or from left to right, the order of their values remains the same.

[illustration omitted]

Messiaen’s student Pierre Boulez experimented with related methods of generating symmetric and asymmetric rhythmic figures by transformation of rhythmic cells. For example, he created figures that were the rhythmic inverse of another figure (i.e., notes replaced by rests and vice-versa).
As Grisey (1987) pointed out, these kinds of rhythmic abstractions (i.e., permutational and symmetrical note relations) make absurd assumptions about perception:

Such a distinction, whatever its operational value, has no perceptible value. . . . What a utopia this spatial and static [notion] of time was, a veritable straight line at the center of which the listener sits implicitly, possessing not only a memory but also a prescience that allows him to apprehend the symmetrical moment at the time it occurs! Unless, of course, our superman were gifted with a memory that enabled him to reconstruct the entirety of the durations so that he could, a posteriori, classify them as symmetrical or not!

The passage below from Curtis Roads' recently-published book, Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic (Oxford, 2015), explains why "live performance and improvisation" aren't among the topics covered:

Live performance has a long tradition and is an important domain of electronic music. Recent texts by Borgo (2005), Barbosa (2008), Jordà (2007), Collins (2007), Dean (2009a), Perkis (2009), Tanaka (2009), Lewis (2009), Oliveros (2009), and Pellegrino (2010), among many others, explore the issues that surround live performance, including extensions into network-based interaction.

In the bad old days of computer music, there was no live performance. Algorithmic composition, sound synthesis, and sound processing could not be realized in real time. Today real-time interactive performance is common. I frequently perform with synthesizers and sound transformation tools, even if it is in the studio and not live onstage. Continued technical research in support of live performance is essential. This involves the design of new electronic instruments and modalities of performance interaction.

The risks associated with improvisation onstage can instill a live performance with dramatic and emotional impact. A key to success in such performances is virtuosity, a combination of talent plus rigorous practice. We hear this in Earl Howard’s Strasser 60 (2009), a tour de force of sonic textures played live on a sampling synthesizer. Behind such a piece are months of sound design and rehearsal to prepare the 20-minute performance.

Richard Devine’s Disturbances (2013), which he performed live on a modular synthesizer at UCSB, is another impressive demonstration of virtuosic control.

When I project my music in a hall, another kind of live performance takes place: sound projection or diffusion. This consists of varying the dynamics, equalization, and spatialization of music that is already composed in order to take advantage of a particular space and its sound system. Virtuosity drives such performances, but this is based as much on intimate knowledge of the music being projected as it is on physical dexterity. The key is knowing precisely when and how to change the projection, keeping in mind the resources of a given hall and its sound system. (For a discussion of the aesthetic significance of sound projection as a performance interpretation, see Hoffman 2013.)

The idea of combining acoustic instruments and electronic tape has a venerable tradition, dating back to the early concerts of the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète, in which Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry collaborated to make Orphée 51 for soprano and tape (Chion 1982). Extending this line, many composers, such as my colleague JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, write mixed pieces that combine a virtuoso instrumental score with electronic sound and interactive processing. Mixed pieces pose many aesthetic challenges, and I admire those who master that difficult medium. For more on live interactive electronic music with instruments, see, for example, Rowe (1993, 2001).

In contrast, my compositional practice is studio based. Playing an instrument in real time is central to my studio work, keeping in mind that “playing” and “instrument” go beyond traditional modalities to encompass interaction with software. I record these (sometimes improvised, sometimes planned) performances, and this is often how I generate the raw material for a composition. Due to the nature of my music, however, which is organized in detail on multiple timescales down to the microscale, it is impossible for me to generate it in real time onstage.

Studio practice affords the ultimate in flexibility and access to the entire field of time on multiple scales. The ability to zoom in and out from the micro to the macro and back, as well as move forward and backward in time (e.g., compose the end before the beginning, change the beginning without modifying the rest of the piece), are hallmarks of studio practice. Sounds can be reversed and their time support can be freely modified with varispeed and pitch-time changing or utterly scrambled by granulation. Once the macroform of a composition has been designed, I sometimes finish it by sprinkling it with a filigree of transients—like a dash of salt and pepper here and there in time.

These kinds of detailed studio practices take time. Indeed, a journalist emphasized the glacial timescale of my composition process, which to me is merely the natural pace of the work (Davis 2008). In order to construct an intricate sequence of sound events, I often listen at half speed or even slower. A passage of a few seconds may take a week to design. The process often begins as an improvisation. I try an experiment, listen to it, revise it, then perhaps backtrack and throw it away (deleting the past). I write notes and make a plan for the next improvisation. I reach a dead end and leave a piece for weeks in order to come back with a fresh perspective. My composition process takes place over months or years. Epicurus was composed over the period of 2000–2010. The original sound material in Always (2013) dates to 1999, and the piece was assembled over a period of three years.

Thus it makes no sense for me to pretend to have anything particularly interesting to say about onstage live performance of electronic music. I leave this for others.