I'm not entirely sure this fits into one of my two categories: without actually attending the concert I can't be sure. For all I know the whole concert might be meticulously notated in every detail, making use of all sorts of subtle structural devices. Or it might be very loosely notated with just a few simple charts for mnemonic purposes. You might think "so what?" and "who cares?" but it does make a difference because it is an indicator of the aesthetic approach of the artists.Star violinist David Mendoza teams up with five top musicians for a one-night-only concert at the Teatro Angela Peralta. Grammy‐nominated recording artist Michael Hoppé says Mendoza’s “wonderfully expressive violin playing” is, quite simply, “one of the most beautiful sounds one can hear in San Miguel de Allende.”Mendoza’s self‐penned music cannot be classified with a single term. Take gypsy jazz, Paganini‐level classical technique, a sighing and breathing bow, dancing fingers, and a rainbow palette of musical colors, and combine them. Mix in elements of “post‐rock” – the use of electronics to create ethereal timbres and textures, and the hypnotic repetition of musical motifs à la Brian Eno.
Here is how I conceive the difference between composed and non-composed music. Composed music, while it might be mired in the mediocre regurgitation of every cliché under the sun, is intended to be worked out in some way. In other words we resort to musical notation when we want to lay out a particular structure that has been worked out in advance. The reason for this is precisely to avoid falling into the reproduction of clichés and standardized arrangements and textures. Music notation enables us to put down on paper inspired and original ideas and not have them lost in the ether.
What I am calling "non-composed" music is music that is in much less need of precise notation. It is music that might have a lot of sources other than the mind of a particular musician. It might contain idioms and gestures from a host of traditional or established and popular styles: gypsy jazz, blues, gospel, "classical" (in the sense of stuff that sounds vaguely classical), post-rock, and so on. A particular piece will have a characteristic theme or themes, specific harmonic gestures and a style or styles drawn from various sources. It does not have a precisely notated structure because it is going to be partly improvised on the spot using textures and rhythms that are part of the musical vernacular.
A concert described in terms such as those above is likely a concert of non-composed music. While it might be excellent it is often, in my experience, a frequently-heard discourse of typical motifs, rhythms and harmonies. Another concert advertised this week was of a piano trio (which consists of violin, cello and piano, not of three pianos as you might think). The content of the program included pieces by Scriabin, Haydn and Schubert. Now you might think that all this music is going to be very familiar (maybe not the Scriabin) and yes, there is going to be a lot that is familiar about the kind of musical language. But this is composed music, music that has a structure and expression that was precisely created and notated by a specific composer for a specific aesthetic purpose.
I tend to prefer composed to non-composed music for these reasons. Not to say that there are not exceptions, some of them very powerful and compelling exceptions. Some non-composed music is absolutely terrific and it might be worth exploring why this is so. And some composed music is dreary, bland and boring. I think we already know why that is! Also, some composed music does not have a strict, predetermined structure, but still, I think, qualifies as composed music. I am thinking here of Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI and similar works.
I welcome your comments, of course.
For our envoi, what the heck, let's listen to that Stockhausen:
I've gotten a sense that the differences between composed and non-composed/improvised music have been balkanized in the last century or so by philosophical or ideological gambits. I read a paper someone recommended to me in the last year or so in which a scholar made an observation that the post-Cage aleatoric music scene seemed really committed to the term aleatoric, as if improvisation was somehow distinct from it. The punchline, so to speak, was that the term might have been favored by a European avant garde idiom that wanted to distance itself from popular styles in which improvisation is simply called improvisation. The associated punchline/conclusion was that John Cage may not have been any "more" racist than people of his time but he was not "less" racist, either.
ReplyDeleteBut ... it would seem that anyone with a modicum of reading in and about "early music" as it's come to be called (and that by now seems to mean any music composed before about 1700), that the boundaries between "composed" and improvised music were more permeable. I don't want to dredge up treatises on improvising over ground bass lines since I can tell from reading this blog you already have some familiarity with that, but it seems that a lot of the polemics I'm seeing in the New Musicology seem predicated on battling 19th century tropes about the arts and artists that I never subscribed to to begin with.
I'm not much of a Stockhausen plan but the cycle is a good case study of how a work can be strictly composed out at one level but open ended at another level.
I think tomorrow's post is going to be titled: "Aleatoric vs Improvised."
ReplyDeleteI wonder, which part of that advertisement suggests that the music is non-composed? Is it because of the keyword "jazz"?
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm also curious, did you attend that concert? What are your findings?
Actually, I didn't attend either concert! So I am merely speculating as to the degree of composed or non-composed. Still, there are some clues. In the piano trio concert the naming of the specific composers is a clue as was the fact that they named the exact pieces to be played. In the other concert there were a number of clues in the description. Not just the word "jazz" which nearly always implies improvisation, but also the words "gypsy," "post-rock," "hypnotic repetition of musical motifs à la Brian Eno," tend to suggest music at least partly improvised and not tied to a notated score. One especially salient clue is that in the latter concert no individual pieces were named.
ReplyDelete