Ergodic Music

After all the excesses of the last seventy years, many are suspicious of experiment in the arts. Honestly, there are artists who are not out to bamboozle anyone, but just interested in exploring and going beyond the boundaries of the medium. One interesting example is what is known as "ergodic literature." The term dates from 1997, but it is much older than that. One example familiar to musicians is the Chinese I Ching, a text used for divination and by John Cage to compose music. I read a really interesting text published in in English in 1988 by Milodan Pavić called Dictionary of the Kazars which purports to be an historical account of the conversion of the Kazars to Judaism in the 8th century CE. The thing is that it is in the form of three, sometimes contradictory, books, each written from the point of view of a different Abrahamic religion: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Very interesting book!

As you can see from the Wikipedia article, the idea has really taken off in recent years. I've just discovered some recent examples I am going to have a look at. What characterizes ergodic literature is that the reader has to make a non-trivial effort to read the work as it may be fragmented, displayed on different levels or made convolute in various creative ways. A very cool idea! My guitar technique book, which never caught on commercially, is actually an example, which may be why it didn't catch on. In order to get a large number of technical exercises into a few pages, I presented them as a kind of technique kit. Abel Carlevaro, in his right hand exercises writes out dozens and dozens of possibilities all using the same diminished seventh chord up and down the neck. This seemed ludicrous to me so my right hand exercises are all on one single page, where I show all the right hand fingerings followed by three or four pages of left hand possibilities. Probably 100,000 exercises in three or four pages. No redundancies.

In my compositions I have "aleatory" sections where short musical moments are shown that may be combined in different ways. It is the same as the idea of ergodic literature: the player has to put together certain aspects of the music themselves. Of course John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others were doing this fifty or sixty years ago.

Anyway, as John Cage might have said, this is one sure way of ensuring that you will not have to worry about falling into the slough of despond of commercial success!

Here is a John Cage piece written using the I Ching: Music of Changes for piano. The interesting thing is that it still sounds like John Cage.