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.
When I was in Toronto recently recording two of my pieces I referred to a particular passage in once piece as "the aleatory section." As my collaborators were seasoned professional classical musicians I assumed they would know what I meant, and they did, roughly, but it was evident that the term "aleatory" was not one that was heard with any frequency! Sounds like a good topic for a post. Also, there was a comment on my recent post on composed and non-composed music that mentioned both aleatoric music and improvised music without distinguishing them clearly. They are different things!
As the term "improvised" music is in common use, let's take it up first. Wikipedia is usually fairly useful in providing a basic understanding of terms like this so let's consult their article on Musical Improvisation:
Musical improvisation (also known as musical extemporization) is the creative activity of immediate ("in the moment") musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians.[1] Sometimes musical ideas in improvisation are spontaneous, but may be based on chord changes in classical music[1] and many other kinds of music. One definition is a "performance given extempore without planning or preparation."[2] Another definition is to "play or sing (music) extemporaneously, by inventing variations on a melody or creating new melodies, rhythms and harmonies."[3] Encyclopædia Britannica defines it as "the extemporaneous composition or free performance of a musical passage, usually in a manner conforming to certain stylistic norms but unfettered by the prescriptive features of a specific musical text. Improvisation is often done within (or based on) a pre-existing harmonic framework or chord progression. Improvisation is a major part of some types of 20th-century music, such as blues, jazz, and jazz fusion, in which instrumental performers improvise solos, melody lines and accompaniment parts.
That's the whole first paragraph. The article goes on to discuss the use of improvisation historically and in various musical genres. There are a few odd things about the above discussion, don't you think? For example, saying "the creative activity of immediate ("in the moment") musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians" is a bit confusing. What does it mean to combine performance with communication of emotions and musical technique? Isn't that a category error? Performance is communication using musical technique, is it not? It's not like you add communication to performance.
Yes, improvisation can certainly encompass a spontaneous response to what the other musicians are doing, but, on the other hand, so can all performance. The first time reading, for example, a piece for violin and piano, the two musicians will not only be playing their parts in an expressive manner, they will also be responding, in an expressive manner, to the way the other musician is playing. Over time these responses will become settled, but for most creative musicians I suspect there will always be an element of expressive spontaneity, otherwise the performance would become dry and stilted, not to mention, boring.
The idea that improvisation is a performance "given extempore without planning or preparation" is a nice thought, but it almost never happens. You can have absolutely free improvisation in nearly any musical genre, but it typically happens behind closed doors, not in a performance with a listening public. Jazz, classical, rock musicians do do this sort of thing, but it is rarely done in public. It is exploratory and while it is an interesting kind of communication between musicians and can lead to original ideas, it often results in meaningless thrashing around, which is why it is not done in public much.
What is typically called "improvisation" is something rather more rehearsed. Out of practice sessions that are more or less improvised, the most expressive or useful bits are preserved and used in public performances. The musicians know, more or less, what they are going to do, individually and collectively, and there are portions that are fixed and portions that are relatively freer and everyone knows which are which. This is the typical situation with jazz and fusion.
With pop music, while there can be lots of improvisation in rehearsal, by the time of performance and recording the performance will have gelled to the point of being very largely fixed in its final form. In a lot of traditional musics, improvisation in the form of improvised variations is quite common, but it occurs within particular boundaries. In classical music, as the article notes, there were certain places, the cadenzas of concertos for example, where the individual performer was expected to improvise a solo. Sometimes this was extemporaneous, but often prepared in detail beforehand so as to avoid the tragedy of not coming up with anything good on the night!
In the Renaissance and Baroque the performance practice included the improvising of ornaments to nearly any piece. Just which and where were learned as part of one's musical education.
We have lots of examples of musicians improvising whole performances from scratch. Bach could improvise fugues and there were even contests between him and other musicians. He could improvise a fugue on a subject given to him on the spot. Beethoven could improvise whole lengthy pieces as could Mozart and a number of other musicians. As these people are primarily composers it seems that what they were doing was simply composing on the spot.
So much for improvisation, what about aleatoric music? The Latin word "alea" means "dice" so the term means music with the element of chance. Wikipedia says:
Aleatoric music is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.
The concept is more easily understood through examples. Aleatoric music is music that is written down, unlike improvised music, but the way it is played involves chance procedures. There are examples of this in Charles Ives and Henry Cowell where the result of notated music will occur partly due to chance. There is always an indeterminate aspect to aleatory music. Three different kinds can be distinguished:
1) the use of random procedures to produce a determinate, fixed score, (2) mobile form, and (3) indeterminate notation, including graphic notation and texts
Examples of the first kind include a number of pieces by John Cage in which he used coin tosses and the I Ching to pick the notes and rhythms which he then notated in a score. The choices were random, but the score is entirely determined. Mobile form was developed by Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Karlheinz Stockhausen and consists of a score that is precisely notated, but in which the various parts can be played in an order chosen by the performer either randomly or decided beforehand. The third kind uses a kind of notation that is intentionally vague as to pitches and rhythms so the performer is expected to intuit what would be an appropriate performance.
The type that I find the most interesting is the second one and I would like to refer to two examples. The first is perhaps the most famous instance, Klavierstück XI by Stockhausen that I posted the other day. Here is a brief excerpt with the score so you can see how it works.
Wikipedia describes the structure as follows:
Klavierstück XI consists of 19 fragments spread over a single, large page. The performer may begin with any fragment, and continue to any other, proceeding through the labyrinth until a fragment has been reached for the third time, when the performance ends. Markings for tempo, dynamics, etc. at the end of each fragment are to be applied to the next fragment.
So the order of the musical phrases is by chance as are the expressive parameters that will be applied to each phrase. This kind of structure is often called "moment form" after another piece by Stockhausen for orchestra. In my recent piece for violin and guitar I used a type of moment form in one section. The inspiration was from the Canadian composer Anthony Genge who used a version in a piece for alto flute and guitar. In my piece, this section acts as a kind of development section. All of the individual elements are taken from the rest of the conventionally notated piece. Each performer has a number of "moments" and they can be played in any order. Then they are repeated, again in any order. What moments are heard together is by chance and the performers are free to express or interpret each moment in response to what the other musician is doing. I find this a quite interesting contrast to the rest of the piece. Here is that section:
Click to enlarge
I will be putting up that whole piece, called Dark Dream, fairly soon. Right now I am working on two companion pieces to it, one called Articulated Dream and the other Dream Scherzo.
Alex Ross put up a post on a new recording of Charles Ives the other day. Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa have recorded four violin sonatas. I'm pretty fond of both artists as I posted here and here. But I'm of two minds about Charles Ives. Listen to the piece, the "In the Barn" movement from the Violin Sonata #2, excerpted by Alex Ross in the post.
Back in the late 60s and early 70s when I started listening to classical music, Charles Ives was one of the big recent discoveries and a number of recordings of his music were issued by major artists such as the recording of Three Places in New England with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Boston Symphony in 1970. Now there are an enormous number of recordings and even entire festivals devoted to his music. He stands at the beginning of the American 'experimental' music movement that continued with Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Conlon Nancarrow and John Cage. There is a lot to be said for this approach as it acknowledges no barriers or rules. Let's have a listen to music by each of those. First Henry Cowell:
This is from a 1968 documentary about Harry Partch. He wrote quite a bit about his theories of tuning and scales. That reference to a "true major third" at the end of the excerpt alludes to the fact that in modern equal-tempered tuning (developed in the 18th century) all intervals are actually slightly out of tune. Equal-tempered thirds, for example, are all slightly sharp. The reason the equal-tempered tuning was developed was that without it, modulation to remote keys like A flat is impossible. Partch developed a 43-tone octave to solve the problem. Actually, I think what that does is create even greater problems! I had the great good fortune a number of years ago to visit the collection of Partch's instruments that were stored at the time in White Plains, NY. I got to try out a couple of them and I can attest that the giant bass marimba is a truly amazing instrument.
If you ever want to make a pianist really uncomfortable, just play them some Nancarrow. In these studies for player piano he worked by incising the notes manually. A player piano works by reading a roll of heavy paper in which slots have been cut. Each slot produces a note. By using a special cutting mechanism, a performance could be 'recorded' on a roll and played back. Here is an early ragtime performance:
But what Nancarrow did was to create compositions by cutting the slots manually into the roll. This meant that he was not restricted in any way by the limitations of an actual performer. So what a pianist hears in Nancarrow are things that are simply impossible!
Now for some John Cage:
I suspect that the book on this tradition has yet to be written and a lot of the basic research probably hasn't even been done yet. But we can make a few observations. First of all, the idea was to throw away all the past traditions and discover entirely new ways of making music. This goal was certainly achieved! Charles Ives, at least in some of his music, took the tunes, chords and rhythms he heard all around, like the fiddle tunes in "In the Barn" and did a kind of 'mash-up' of them. Cowell, inspired by some mystical ideas, created some great atmospheric music by using the piano in entirely new ways. Harry Partch went back to some very ancient Greek ideas about tuning and combined it with a Bohemian sensibility. Have a listen to his piece called Barstow for an example. Nancarrow took a unique approach that prefigured and paralleled some of the work others were starting to do with tape and computer music. He eliminated the performer in the process. John Cage summarized all that had gone before and took things to their logical conclusion.
This is all fascinating, of course, but if you set out to experiment and break all the rules, most of the time what you end up with is harmonic incoherence, rhythmic chaos and melodic confusion and that is what we mostly hear. After all this experimentation has been done, someone has to come along and find out what new musical principles have been discovered and try to make music with them. What principles of structure and harmony do we find underlying the music of Charles Ives? Or Harry Partch? Or Conlon Nancarrow? In the case of John Cage, he purports to have made sure, by means of chance procedures, that there aren't any.
Well, that's too bad... I suspect that a lot of experimental music re-invents the wheel or wants to un-invent the wheel, or is just incoherent. But somewhere in there are some genuinely valuable new approaches.
