Intuition

 Yesterday I ended my post The Rôle of Tradition (and notice that here I snuck in a very old diacritical mark over the "o" as a bow to tradition) with Palais de Mari, a piano piece by Morton Feldman. Here I want to talk a little bit about that piece and the rôle of intuition. A while ago I put up a post titled Chance and Creation and I think that when I was talking about "chance," what I was really referring to might better be described as "intuition."

Let me quote from a paper on Palais de Mari by a music theorist, Frank Sani titled "Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari: a pitch analysis." It begins:

Much to the disappointment of the analytical mind, a piece like Palais de Mari defies explanation. To be negative about it, therefore, would be tempting, especially after hours of investigation leading nowhere; however, it is more fruitful to take this as the triumph of a composer who allowed the irrational to penetrate a precisely notated score.

"Defies explanation" is quite an admission from a music theorist whose very bread and butter is nothing but explanation!

That Feldman took an almost improvisational approach to his compositions, akin to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, must be kept in mind at all times: it is an irrational approach, where pitch notation serves as mere editing, where sound-shapes are pictorial and serve no tonal precept or structure. If anything, the use of pitch in late pieces like Palais de Mari may have been influenced by the colour variations observed by Feldman in the weft-and-warp of the Anatolian rugs he collected.

Perhaps Feldman was inspired by the patterns in Anatolian carpets as Sani mentions. But the really interesting point here is that Feldman is following primarily his intuitions whether they are deep or fleeting. What Sani ends up doing, instead of uncovering a plan or structure for the composition, which seems not to exist, is offer some catalogues of what he calls "group classes" or clusters of pitches which recur:

So, not terribly illuminating. Going back to the piece, what we hear are a lot of subtle pitch and rhythmic variations (Sani doesn't deal with the rhythmic or metric aspects of the score) along with some interesting voice-leading. For example, movement by step, especially by semitone, is always a strong voice-leading gesture and we find a lot of them here: the F to E at the beginning, repeated, the E to D# immediately after, also repeated. Later on (mm 36 et. seq.) we find high grace note Gs followed by high grace note F#s, also repeated. The repetition underlines and emphasizes the voice-leading.

But I don't want to get into offering my own theoretical analysis of a piece which Sani correctly identifies as "refractory to analysis." Instead I want to commit the even greater sin of speculating about Feldman's thought processes! Hey, I was trained as a musicologist, not a theorist.

I suspect that this piece, along with most of Feldman's work, was composed primarily through intuition. That is, you sit down and either pick out notes or hear notes or imagine a skein of notes and rhythms and then try and put them down on paper. It is a kind of mental improvisation. Incidentally, precisely this method was the one pursued by the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi who improvised on a piano or ondiola. Many of these were recorded and later transcribed by musicians who worked with him. This is music that comes from the intuition or subconscious or trance state or transcendent plane.

In my previous post it was this sort of thing that I, rather inaccurately, described as "chance" because that is sometimes how I think of it. Something just comes to you: a note, a rhythm, perhaps just a timbre, and then you sit down and try and work with it. People like Feldman and Scelsi want to just let whatever it is flow to wherever it wants to flow to. But that language seems to assume the existence of something metaphysical, the "it," which puzzles me.

Here is a piece by Scelsi, Natura Renovatur for 11 strings: