New Form in New Music: A No-Part Invention
Logan K. Young
January 16, 2008
With the possible exception of Lutaslowski's chains, Boulez's tropes, Cage's bastardized I Ching, Riley's string modules, Stockhausen's texts, and my own admittedly trite rip-off of those "chose your own ending" books, there has been no significant formal innovation in contemporary Western art music. Additionally, of the examples mentioned above, all were, to varying degrees, performer-mediated conceptuals – less a product of compositional formalism, dependent more upon performance whimsy. And while electronic music has made numerous contributions to the timbral palette and the sheer possibility of sound, it too is guilty of formal stagnation. (Although some algorithmic compositions are making amends for the transgressions of its forebears.) In short, Western concert music still starts big and ends big, or starts small and ends small (or some combination of the like), still relies on severely antiquated notions of form, still reads from Christian left to Christian right, and ultimately, still exists as a two-dimensional displacement in Cartesian space-time. Other idioms are likewise afflicted, yet by a more aesthetically suffocating strain: Jazz is still theme and variations, rock is still ternary and hip-hop shall remain "hook"-based drivel. Therefore, John Sloboda's qualifying "more likely" modifier - as in "composers are 'more likely' to achieve successful innovation of forms" - is indeed well prescribed.
His thoughts concerning improvisation are equally as appropriate. By trade, improvisers are not required to boldly confront 2,000 years of Western musical precedence (not to mention about 50 years of documented non-Western procedure) and contemplate the formal and/or aesthetic implications of assigning an order to a series of their own musical events. They improvise within the form; the do not create it. After all, solid formal construction requires a rather long and emotionally taxing gestation period in which the composer, sculptor, painter or poet takes stock of the material at hand - its content, its proportions, its colors, its imagery - and using an incredibly complex series of decision-making mechanisms that we will perhaps never fully understand, decides what comes next. Thus, improvisation "on the fly" does anything but. It is simply beyond our cognitive capacities to instantaneously calculate the connotations and repercussions of a user-defined musical event, unless of course it occurs within the realm of a well-defined, pre-determined, almost axiomatic network system. Old Bach was able to improvise organ fugues only because of his familiarity with the form itself, and perhaps more importantly, the formulae of its construction. Jazzmen are able to solo convincingly on "So What" because they have spent countless hours in the Dorian mode. It is Stevie Ray Vaughn's intimate knowledge of the blues - as theoretical abstraction (i.e. scale, harmonic progression, etc.) - that allows him to speak so candidly within it. And while the methodology of genre assimilation is perhaps less familiar with regards to the hip-hop practitioner, someone somewhere at least knew the right song from which to steal. Nonetheless, there comes a time when even the most seasoned improviser can no longer improvise anything beyond what he already knows. It was for this very reason that Lukas Foss admitted to abandoning his pioneering improvisatory efforts of the late 1950s with southern California's Improvisation Chamber Ensemble. It may also explain why completely improvised works such as the work from groups like Cardew's infamous Scratch Orchestras are merely the sonic sum of its aggregate performers' musical proclivities. Furthermore, this phenomenon of eventually reaching a maximal improvisatory potential might also contribute to the overall musical restlessness of performers whose primary mode of self-expression is, what else, improvisation itself.
In his more-than-partially ghostwritten Poetics of Music, compiled from those notoriously suspect Norton Lectures at Harvard (remember Bernstein's big music = language goof?), Stravinsky encourages the voluntary imposition of compositional strictures on the creative act:
"I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves…If everything is permissible to me…I cannot use anything as a basis, and consequently every undertaking becomes futile…Let me have something finite, definite – matter that can lend itself to my operation only insofar as it is commensurate with my possibilities…The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit."
For when confronted with myriad of techniques, devices and manipulations that several millennia of documented creative activity has so thoughtfully dumped into his lap, combined with the utter lack of a prevailing style amongst contemporary artists regardless of medium, the modern artist is understandably shell-shocked. And while some of the most thought provoking and aesthetically convincing music is indeed born out of restriction (e.g. serialism, minimalism, Franco-Flemish counterpoint), formal innovation benefits most from the free exchange of ideas. And until today's composers, and to an admittedly lesser degree its improvisers are wiling to intellectually resuscitate this notion of conceptual diplomacy within the realm of contemporary compositional forms, form itself will continue to remain a no-part invention.
His thoughts concerning improvisation are equally as appropriate. By trade, improvisers are not required to boldly confront 2,000 years of Western musical precedence (not to mention about 50 years of documented non-Western procedure) and contemplate the formal and/or aesthetic implications of assigning an order to a series of their own musical events. They improvise within the form; the do not create it. After all, solid formal construction requires a rather long and emotionally taxing gestation period in which the composer, sculptor, painter or poet takes stock of the material at hand - its content, its proportions, its colors, its imagery - and using an incredibly complex series of decision-making mechanisms that we will perhaps never fully understand, decides what comes next. Thus, improvisation "on the fly" does anything but. It is simply beyond our cognitive capacities to instantaneously calculate the connotations and repercussions of a user-defined musical event, unless of course it occurs within the realm of a well-defined, pre-determined, almost axiomatic network system. Old Bach was able to improvise organ fugues only because of his familiarity with the form itself, and perhaps more importantly, the formulae of its construction. Jazzmen are able to solo convincingly on "So What" because they have spent countless hours in the Dorian mode. It is Stevie Ray Vaughn's intimate knowledge of the blues - as theoretical abstraction (i.e. scale, harmonic progression, etc.) - that allows him to speak so candidly within it. And while the methodology of genre assimilation is perhaps less familiar with regards to the hip-hop practitioner, someone somewhere at least knew the right song from which to steal. Nonetheless, there comes a time when even the most seasoned improviser can no longer improvise anything beyond what he already knows. It was for this very reason that Lukas Foss admitted to abandoning his pioneering improvisatory efforts of the late 1950s with southern California's Improvisation Chamber Ensemble. It may also explain why completely improvised works such as the work from groups like Cardew's infamous Scratch Orchestras are merely the sonic sum of its aggregate performers' musical proclivities. Furthermore, this phenomenon of eventually reaching a maximal improvisatory potential might also contribute to the overall musical restlessness of performers whose primary mode of self-expression is, what else, improvisation itself.
In his more-than-partially ghostwritten Poetics of Music, compiled from those notoriously suspect Norton Lectures at Harvard (remember Bernstein's big music = language goof?), Stravinsky encourages the voluntary imposition of compositional strictures on the creative act:
"I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves…If everything is permissible to me…I cannot use anything as a basis, and consequently every undertaking becomes futile…Let me have something finite, definite – matter that can lend itself to my operation only insofar as it is commensurate with my possibilities…The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit."
For when confronted with myriad of techniques, devices and manipulations that several millennia of documented creative activity has so thoughtfully dumped into his lap, combined with the utter lack of a prevailing style amongst contemporary artists regardless of medium, the modern artist is understandably shell-shocked. And while some of the most thought provoking and aesthetically convincing music is indeed born out of restriction (e.g. serialism, minimalism, Franco-Flemish counterpoint), formal innovation benefits most from the free exchange of ideas. And until today's composers, and to an admittedly lesser degree its improvisers are wiling to intellectually resuscitate this notion of conceptual diplomacy within the realm of contemporary compositional forms, form itself will continue to remain a no-part invention.
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