Brevity Is The Soul Of Non-Tonal Music

If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd agree with me.

I've said it many times before (at a party last night for instance, fascinating company me) but now it's official.

There are exceptions that prove the rule of course (prove as in test obviously, prove as in confirm would be a bit mental) but generally speaking non-tonal music is like a cup of espresso coffee, or a shot of whisky (single malt naturally) or perhaps most cogently, a poem.

Music which has no pulse, no 'tune' and lacks a tonal centre ought to be fairly brief; unless you can find other means of parsing the material into graspable sections or moments (as Sciarrino does with silence/space or Kurtág via many short movements to cite two examples).

To break this 'rule' or to compose in ignorance of it is to run the risk of writing music which approaches a sort of entropy; so much information that the listener can't process it, can't remember it or walk away feeling like they have a clear idea of the piece. Boredom would be a more prosaic description.

More is certainly less in most cases, many a beautiful chord or flowing contrapuntal section has been ruined by suffocation.

If you're going to write a long non-tonal piece (let's say 10+ minutes) justify it, musically (not with some guff in the programme notes or commentary).

Rant over/off.

Feel free to disagree, as always.

Tiny URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/37p95s4

Names and Dates No.2

Here is number two of my Names and Dates for Piano pieces. I've written four so far and I have gone back and scored number one properly now so it needs re-recording (however the piano I recorded it on has gone even more out of tune now).

You can hear a rough version of number one via this previous post.

I suggested in the previous post I intend to explain the method more clearly soon (when I have more written).

I played this piece on a Fender Rhodes MkII instead, it gives a reasonable impression of what it will sound like on a real piano (also I think the Rhodes needs to be tuned, again, especially low down, it's tricky and time consuming so I have been delaying doing it)

It is the simplest one of the set so far, it's based on the name and the date of birth of my friend Al's newborn son. There are four phrases which are clearly separated, the first three are his names (first, middle and surname) and the last phrase is his date of birth. I wanted to state the facts as plainly as possible and finish (unlike the other pieces which use the usual method of transposition, inversion and complementation, and rhythmic repetition and yes, even some literal repetition).

So no manipulation of sets or rhythms are involved, it's straight through and each phrase has no particular harmonic connection to the other apart from some common intervals (tones and semitones, which can be octave displaced).

The piece is an exercise in trying to relate more or less unrelated material (unlike number one which featured two closely related sets of the same cardinal number, just happened that the name I used mapped that way onto the chromatic scale).

Also given the premise for this series of pieces I have to work with the results of the 'gematria' process (the pitches are determined by their letters and dates by their respective digits) so it's also a handing over of harmonic control to some extent, a limitation to deal with (not something I intend to do a great deal but I quite like the concept and the results so far so I will continue with it for now).

I've attached a draft of the score below (I haven't been using Sibelius very long and I need to work out how to get rid of the time signatures, they are not necessary for this piece as they just make it look more complicated than it needs to be, I can 'hide' them but can't shift the notes along into the middle of each bar)

UPDATE: I worked out how to get rid of the time signatures, better draft score now included below (awaiting some final revisions/checking and/or simplifiations possibly).

UPDATE 2: changed the fermata rests to tied whole notes (clearer than saying rest but with the pedal down, a somewhat convoluted idea perhaps).

Another Quote For The Fourth Of February

Elliott Carter

Elliott Carter: I began to be interested in many of aspects of composition besides the harmonic structure. I felt that if I used a very - not simple, but easily manipulated harmonic structure then I could focus on other aspects of composition, like the spacing of chords and musical characterisation.

And you see one of the very basic problems of all this is I'm really writing contrapuntal music so that these chords are seldom notes played at the same time. And already this ends up causing a conflict of purpose. The problem has always been for the me the desire for a kind of contrapuntal and polyrhythmic structure, which couldn't sound the chords as simultaneous attacks. It involved all kinds of intellectual conflicts. I mean if you have one line going one way and another line coming against it, how do you decide which of the intervals you consider part of the structure?

John Link: And how do you resolve those kinds of questions?.

EC: I resolve them in different ways. Sometimes, for instance, I would just establish one chord and have all the different lines play only those notes. Or play those notes for a short time and then change one of the intervals and gradually move into another chord. I've tried every kind of thing I could think of. And in the end also, I found that the other side of it was that using many chord patterns led me to passages I didn't like.

JL: How so?

EC: I just didn't like the sound of them. So then I worked around until I found passages I did like, even if it didn't follow any of these systems exactly. All through my compositions there are moments when I did things that I thought sounded better than what this chord system produced, because it seemed more in character with what I wanted. There were many different intentions fighting together which in the end soon made me feel that maybe this system was not as useful as it had been to me and that there were other matters I was more concerned with. So I simplified my vocabulary and made it into something more restricted.

From pg:33-34 of Elliott Carter's Harmony Book.

Quote Of The Day (28/03/08)

'The composer makes plans, music laughs.'

Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman.

Elliott Carter and The Grateful Dead

Curious how Elliott Carter, one of our most venerable composers of music for the concert hall, and Phil Lesh, best known as the bass player for the Grateful Dead, ever crossed paths? Though you might not ordinarily connect these two composers, there are some surprising musical links between them, supported by a friendship of many years.

http://www.counterstreamradio.org/specialprograms/carter_lesh/default.asp


Photo by Jeffrey Herman

Composition Utilities and Free Software

Assorted online utilities and some free software



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Jay`s Set Theory Calculator

http://www.jaytomlin.com/music/settheory/
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Composer Tools

http://composertools.com/Tools/
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An excellent free piece of software (the basic version) based on Xenakis` UPIC program..

http://highc.org/index.html

UPIC description..

*UPIC-Unite Polygogique Informatique du CEMAMu. A sort of musical drawing board which through the digitization of a drawing, enables one to compose music, teach acoustics, engage in musical pedagogy at any age. This machine was developed at the Centre d`Etudes de Mathematiques et Automatiques Musicales de Paris.

Footnote:page 12:Iannis Xenakis: Formalised Music (updated/expanded edition)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Formalized-Music-Mathematics-Composition-Harmonologia/dp/1576470792/ref=pd_sim_b?ie=UTF8&qid=1205687785&sr=8-1
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When prominent scientist Stephen Wolfram published A New Kind of Science in 2002, it was immediately hailed as a major intellectual landmark. Today the paradigm shift that Wolfram's work initiated is starting revolutions in a remarkable range of areas of science, technology--and the arts. WolframTones is an experiment in applying Wolfram's discoveries to the creation of music.

http://tones.wolfram.com/about/controls-side.html

Quote of the Day (16/03/08)

'Composition, action are nothing but a struggle for existence. To be. If however, I imitate the past, I do nothing, and consequently I am not. In other words, I am sure that I exist only if I do something different. The difference is the proof of existence, of knowledge, of participation in the affairs of the world. I`m convinced of that'

Iannis Xenakis: 'Conversations with Iannis Xenakis' (Varga)

L-Systems

I`ll be developing more ideas on this topic as I go (early days). As a start, how about this...

Interesting/useful thesis here about L-Systems and music..

http://www.koncon.nl/public_site/220/Sononieuw/NL/thesis-pdf/Stelios%20Manousakis-Musical%20L-systems.pdf

Some background..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system

Graphic Scores

An interesting project here about graphic scores...

http://www.notations21.net/index.html

Features some score examples (amongst other things)

http://www.notations21.net/viewscores.html

Found Via NewMusicBox

http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5462


Birdgong by Barry Guy