Music That Accelerates From 0-60 Without Fuel
It has been said that one of the merits of getting a music education is to be able to communicate about music in a clear and concise manner. I'm sure I've mastered the first point but perhaps I have not mastered the second. In any event, this article delineates, in as concise a manner (in a field as complex as music) as I am capable of at this point in time, what contemporary composers could be doing and why.
In talking about it I will attempt to show how to balance competing forces that transmodern composers are faced with. The competing forces I see are to a) be different, b) be likeable, c) be accessible to performers, d) be flexible, e) be inclusive of the community,
First of all, the contemporary mature audience requires something they can sink their teeth into. The music can be different enough to sound fresh, keeping up with modern developments such as additive techniques and self-retrograding rhythms as in one of the most recent developments, the downtown school of postminimalist music which has also been titled Totalism. Its better if composers don not talk in terms of their influences.
That usually means a composer might be openminded but doesn't prove originality or anything else. Originality is also over rated. It will become clear why I think so. I prefer to talk in terms of ideas especially the ones based on philosophical considerations whether they're unique or not.
It has been suggested that one way innovation occurs is from contributions made by fields tangential to the one in question, in this case music. If a person trained in car design is asked to make a radically new design, they usually can't do it. They can't think out of the car design box in which they were trained.
But if someone trained in hydraulics is asked ,they come up with a car that accelerates from 0-60 without even turning on the motor by storing the normally wasted energy, the last time the car came to a stop, as hydraulic pressure. This is what innovative composers do with music. I aspire to be innovative in the same way. Architecture, geometry, developments in art and literature to name a few can and do influence music in the transmodern era.
So, that's where a composer can look for inspiration. For example, some postmodern architecture goes through different detail elaborations as a person walks through a building. This can be translated into music.
Techno is similar in this respect. Geometry has made gains in recent years with the development of fractal geometry. Music usually isn't very fractal but some aspects of self similarity can be used in music composition.
Gamelan music is more fractal than western music. Post-postmodern art is putting the frame back on the canvas while still incorporating some process oriented and audience participatory elements. Musically this means, that chance and serialist procedures can be a tool in the compositional arsenal but not the whole deal.
Experimental music is for working out compositional ideas and not for holding up to the world saying this is the best art on offer. Only the ideas that work are published. Recent innovations in art were impressionism (innovation which
moved away from well defined lines), abstract (innovation away from traditional subject matter) and postmodernism (innovation away from preconceptions about art having a frame where the art stops and the media used to create it).
They are sweeping simplifications, to be sure, but not without their usefulness.
In literature, a fairly recent innovation is the cut up technique. A piece of text can be permutated at the level of paragraph, sentence, words or syllables to achieve unique interesting juxtapositions. It helps achieve a unique approach to self expression and can even create new words.
This really works well to break out of the stranglehold of convention. It has been applied to music also in various ways but the ramifications for it have not been fully explored or explored down sonic dead ends. Tony Williams, Bill Bruford and Allan Holdsworth to name a few postmodern performers used the technique in the studio after recording.
They would cut up pieces of music and rearrange them with other pieces they recorded for the albums. Allan didn't like it that much because he had to relearn all the songs for performance in their new arrangements but the music is really good because Tony's ears have a good aesthetic sense.
The latest events in contemporary music history the way I see it are atonality (innovation away from traditional harmony), serialism (innovation away from traditional melody and tonality.), minimalism (innovation away from preconceptions about instrumentation and form, ambient (innovations away from the traditional purpose of music) and the postmodernism of John Scoffield, Pat Methany etc (innovations away from traditional voicings, progressions and rhythmic approaches).
The serialists thought they were composing the music of the future. Bach knew he was composing the music of his present which is what I believe we need to be doing.
Postmodern art and literature leans decidedly toward an ugliness which I would not want to replicate in music. Its based on a false assumption that in rightfully reacting to the suffocating constraints of traditional forms etc that we should swing toward complete formlessness.
The cut up technique in literature, more often than not, leads to gobbledygook. Nailing a toilet on the wall and calling it art is also nonsense. The postmodern dilemma is how to publish the denial of publishing and mean the absence of meaning. John Cage summed it up well, "I have nothing to say and I'm saying it." The performance of his piece for piano in which the pianist never plays is the height of this wrongheaded philosophy.
My idea is that we don't want ugly formlessness. We want a flexible form. We want enough flexibility for artistic freedom and enough form to have a place to exist.
Also, when art doesn't have a frame, this can lead to non-art but it can also lead to an art that is not complete without audience participation which can be a good thing. This is one direction which I think music can profitably go now and in the future.
Another idea is using non-traditional media. The expanded definition of what constitutes a musical instrument or music lets a cool breeze into a stuffy room but we still need the room. We shouldn't say that anything is music.
We can use techniques like cut up to suggest new directions without being a robotic slave to the technique, allowing it to make every artistic decision for us. If so, then we are not musicians, artists or writers but dispensable automatons.
The movement away from traditional tonality can free up the strangle hold tonality has had on melody. Utilizing harmony in service of the melody is the challenge of the day. Indian and middle eastern melody far outpaces western melodic practice by leaps and bounds precisely because its making up for the lack of harmony. Modal jazz and free jazz artists were going there but took a left turn at the last minute and free jazz was having too much of the undesirable open ended formlessness. It would be nice to hear more inclusion of Indian embellishments in western music.
Serialism suggested new directions music could go but created slaves to compositional technique again and created a new form more rigid than the old one. Their call to greater chaos and complexity for no other reason than that seems to be the direction we are going is like stepping on the gas while approaching a fatal fall from a cliff. Serialism should only be one technique in an repertoire not an inflexible totality.
Minimalism started out all too formless, limited, repetitive, long and boring. However, it was good for getting more out of the traditional keys and showed that playing in the Major/minor/modal system wasn't dead yet. Minimalism has matured recently often having the flexible form I'm thinking about and not just a bunch of copy cats arriving too late to be respected minimalists.
The minimalists have this down better. Music can be wallpaper until you pay attention to it and then discover its nuances. The way to do that is not through simultaneous keys or atonality which, though somewhat interesting for the musicians, alienates the audience.
Postmodern music has a lot going for it. Its fresh because it avoids functional harmony without making that an unbreakable rule. People like Chick Corea, Allan Holdsworth and Frank Gambale among others expanded the palette of chord voicings thank you very much. One thing contemporary composers could do more of is cleanse the music of goal oriented progressions because in western musical practice the idea that one had to return to the tonic rose out of the unconscious philosophical orientation of the merchant classes who had become more wealthy even than the church and aristocracy.
Postmodern music is unfortunately too improvisatory for mass consumption containing almost no examples of outstandingly composed melody whatever. The chords and key often hop around so fast (a skill in itself and not without its beauty) there's no time to state or develop a good melody. That's O.K. as far as it goes but I think even Methany is bored with it now.
Anyway, the microtonalists have alienated the audience completely but it is a direction with a lot of potential if used sparingly in the right hands.
Another competing force is that the music needs to be likeable. Music does not have to pander to the adolescent 15 second attention span and 3 minute radio format like Britney Spears, yet not stretch the attention so far that it breaks as did early minimalism. Music does not need to sound so different that it alienates the audience.
I would prefer to avoid the criticism levelded at Wagner by Mark Twain that his music is better than it sounds. This is accomplished by reigning in the proclivity toward exclusive atonalism, serialism and the avante guarde. As I said before, dissonance and complexity for no other reason than that seems to be the way we are headed is like stepping on the gas while approaching a fatal fall from a cliff.
We should lean back toward the popular, something which has been termed populist so as to remain on the road. We can also lean toward the romantic with greater awareness so as not to wallow in excessive sentimentality which is one of its downfalls.
One of the definitions of beauty is that anything which copies nature is beautiful. The Chambered Nautilus, the Golden Meand and the Fibonacci series are all found in nature and so must be beautiful. They exhibit characteristics of self similarity. A lot of fuss has been made over fractal art and music.
Most music has not been very fractal. Music composed using fractal ideas usually fails to satisfy as much as the visual dimension. Gamelan music is more fractal than western music but not as fractal as the scientists making fractal music based on the Mandelbrot set, the Julia set and fractal triangles etc...
What many fractal musicians don't seem to realize is that the self similarity of many fractals is not identically similar. At each level more and more deviation often occurs. I see this is one recipe for how to make a spiral.
ln art, we want to see symmetry where we expect to find it. When we look at a painting in the western tradition we only expect to see symmetry in the face and body really.
Where do we expect to find symmetry in music. Actually, it seems that the primary place it is located is in the scale and often its tuning. There really aren't that many examples of reversible rhythms except at large levels of the rhythmic structure or melodies except with Bach and such, whose music is definitely for the mathematically inclined and not really the general fare even among Classical or Baroque composers.
Arabic scales known as Maqams and the gamalen's colotomic structure produce very symmetrical scales and rhythms. Two very beautiful musical traditions.
It becomes very obvious that every scale you can play also has a rhythm associated with it when you look at it constructed on a circle with the unison and the octave at the top in the same location. It’s manifestly apparent that some of the Arabic scales have notes which are half-flat or quarter tones for reasons of visual symmetry. It seemed to me unusual that the starting note for many maqams was not the one on the axis of symmetry.
The form of a piece of music is another place where we often find a little symmetry. Beethoven and others were of the opinion that if you are writing a long piece then the beginning goes nowhere fast so you are alerted to the fact it's going to be a longer composition and likewise the ending needed to match the beginning in size somewhat and also relate to the scope of the entire piece.
Jazz tunes play the head, improvise and then return to the head. If the head is short, they play the head twice and the ending twice. This is a kind of symmetry without going to the extent of playing the theme backwards at the end which we don't expect in our tradition.
Symmetry is actually rare in nature except in the faces and bodies of animals. Trees, lakes, rivers, mountains etc. are not symmetrical. Music which does not have the symmetrical elements previously presented has the aesthetic of the nomad not seeing many faces or symmetrical buildings who often lives alone closer to nature and derives his aesthetic from that.
Perhaps a reason to use self retrograding rhythmic structures similar to palinromes in literature such as "A man, a plan, a canal. Panama." is not because of a need for symmetry. It's because the retrograde implies a desire to go backwad in time perhaps to a golden age. This is a little regressive however.
Then there are philosophical considerations. In the Heterotopia where we actually live, we have to honor the interests and aptitudes of the composer, the performer and the audience. We cannot mirror a utopia in which we do not believe.
One based on elitism, ageism, classism, sexism and all. In my case, I'm a composer whose interests and aptitudes cluster around symbols. As such, when made aware of the fact the very notes themselves have symbollic meaning, these symbols are of interest to me.
For example the early Greeks and the early people of India believed the tenet, "As above, so below." They likened the first note in a scale to the king. The fourth and fifth were related to government officials, the other notes of the scale are subjects of the king , the seventh is an untoucheable like someone who, being ethnically inferior is relegated to cleaning toilets the rest of their lives without pay as a slave.
The interval of a diminished fifth is supposed to be demonic and the notes outside of the scale are enemies. This is a misapplication of the saying, "As above, so below" and is what India has inadvertently passed to us through the Greeks and probably also passed on to a lot of other cultures.
The ancients wanted to base their societies or at least SEEM to be basing their MUSIC on the natural order of the universe/heaven. But making God a king and angels into ministers is sheer projection because of the difficulty we have in conceiving of a deity. Suggesting that since there is a caste system in heaven, there should be one on earth serves the upper classes.
Control is not related to morality and is not derived from the authority of a venerable tradition. The upper classes represent their program as fair and themselves and their music theory as moral and proper. They must rationalize their program as closer to immutable values and prevent outsiders from understanding it and acquiring self mastery.
They use it to propogate classism. In western harmonic practice there is also a fascist implication in the resolution of the dominant chord. Classism and Fascism are not philosophies I would like to unconsciously perpetuate.
The little old lady who says she doesn't want that skinhead punk youth in her church, orchestra or community is quite wrong. If the subcultures can't benefit from being a community member, they may take benefits by force after they are disposessed by society and be morally justified in doing so. As far as my music goes, I intend to compose music that has several easy parts.
I aspire to using William Russo's rules for composition published in his book "Composing Music." He says that eight and sixteenth notes followed by rests are difficult to play so I try not to compose that way.
The music also does not have to affirm the biases of visual or even auditory primacy. Music is secondary to even the antropological and sociological forces. Music is not just for expression like the player piano rolls of Conlon Nancarrow where both the performer and audience are absent.
They are interesting to specialists like odd grammar cases but should not be inflicted on children or the rest of us for long. Most people don't want to hear or play that kind of music. Most people don't need it either.
Music is for interaction without which it has less value to society though still retaining some therapeutic value for the individual who produced it. Therefore, I want to compose music which calls for community participation, encouraging "non-musicians," children and the disabled to play with "real" musicians as occurs in African and Cuban culture. This occurs even more in some postmodern art and avant-garde music, when they're not alienating the audience, where the distinction between audience and performer is blurred though perhaps I would not attempt to destroy it if that were even possible.
Neither the composer nor the architect is hero and savior of the world. A canon does not need to be compiled and masterworks do not need to be selected although we can if we like. The music itself can be fogotten as long as it served its purpose while it was played and changes to fit the purposes of the times.
I would like the music to be flexible enough to adapt to the requirements of every performance and performer. Parts can be changed, improvised, added or dropped without any afront to the composer. The modern performer often does not want or need the composer or conductor to write or control every note.
Especially since the sound being produced is sometimes no note at all. In fact the performer can be allowed to compose some or all of the music, even if the performers are children.
As for the audience, their interests and aptitudes are quite broad. In America there are at least three general groups. The capitalists, the traditionalists and the cultural creatives.
Capitalists interested in perpetuating elitism and classism are not an audience we must kowtow to though we may choose to if we like. I for one would like to send a message to them in a way that might reach them however without bowing very low by using independent labels avoiding the L.A. record deal that scams the artist.
I would also like to show the traditionalists that our culture and music is not the one chosen by God to be better than all the others. Often it is merely an accident of being born in a particular time and place that we like what we like. Similar to a lion, other cultures and ideas can be dangerous to our own but that doesn't mean all lions belong in zoos.
Maybe we can even learn something from lions. That means someone with the calling will have to go live close enough to them to find out what they have to teach and not impose that someone's biases on what that someone sees, then communicate that to the rest of us. Of course we don't want to allow ourselves to be cut off at the root and be eaten by lions either which is where our trepidation comes from.
This is why contemporary composers could benefit from studying and using elements from Africa, India, China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Burma, Phillipines, Indonesia, Bali and Australia. Without completely rejecting the western tradition because of its supposed lack of spirituality or whatever. We might benefit from constraining these "foreign" musics to fit a philosophical orientation inherited from Buddhism's contact with the west to not only create something new but to create something viable as a tradition new or not.
We should not try to authentically recreate "foreign" music for several reasons the first of which is that it would be unmarketable if it were not made by the people whose culture it represents . It would not be authentic which is what most people interested in buying that music want including me.
Working within our western tradition with a knowledge of it's history will throw the traditionalists a bone but neither the capitalist nor the traditionalists are the primary audience of transmodern music.
One of the primary concerns most people concerned about families have are the values being imparted to their children by their communities and media. Though we may not have children of our own this is a group of which many of us are members.
In many and perhaps most cultures around the world, art and music are not separated into the categories of sacred and secular. The music, ritual, clothing, architecture and art of a culture are all reflections of their religious/philosophical orientation, art and music in particular. Its not going very far to say that the music and art of a culture often IS their religion.
Very little separation form it can be made and as such is hallowed ground. In the western tradition too, all art and music is really a reflection of a person's values whether we know itr or not.
Mythology, ritual and music were originally for meeting the needs of society and the individuals in it. So, the questions become, "What do people need?" Are our myths, rituals and music meeting those needs? Often the answers seems to be no.
Myths and rituals are the stories we tell ourselves and children that are supposed to initiate the individeual into productive community membership. Our myths usually don't work because often our actions and music prove we believe we can and should save only ourselves regardless of what our mouths preach. We lie, cheat, steal and fool ourselves into thinking we are honest, fair and upstanding citizens as long as we are making money and no one catches us at our corruption.
I want music that inspires an individual or his/her society to live up to more of their productive community membership and their unique expression in it. This music could be used to keep hands busy and out of trouble in afterschool programs for youth at risk, in detenction centers for youths or adults, in churches etc... Students engaged in experiential learning, as occurs in rehearsals and performances of this kind of music, have been shown to take on greater challenges with more confidence, develop compassionate communication skills negotiating with other ensemble members, improve test scores in traditional learning environments due to self motivation and be happier and healthier in general. Students learn valuable skills such as how to build strong bonds within the community.
There is always the dichotomy, in schools, placed between sports and music. This kind of music teachers family values better than traditional sports such as baseball, football, basketball, and soccer. The cliche' scenario is that the sports father's are swearing their heads off at the losers on the other team, their own son's or their son's friends on the team that don't perform up to the only standard that most of them have which is winning.
Besides the negative gender roles most of this communicates there are other concerns. There are the fights between one's own team mates when a game is lost supposedly because of a single player. There are the fights off the field between rival teams.
Students have been killed by each other because of the pressure they feel to be winners and the feeling they are in fact inadequate losers. This does not help the mediocre or inadequate in the arena live up to productive community membership. It breeds a highly competetive and potentially explosive situation where people, fed up with being labled losers, drop out of community membership and rightly so or worse, where the weak, one up the strong with weapons as in Columbine. Some people, thinking they can't succeed on the court or in the field, never enter.
Also, traditional sports were used in early cultures to cultivate warriors. If that's what we need, then sports are the answer. If we need more diplomats and non-violent, real world problem solvers then something else is required.
Another result of sports programming is people focused on sports wrap their identities up in being athletes and members of a cliquish team. They wear clothes to school with their team logos on them so they will be identified as athletes, can't be torn away from the T.V. when a game is on, are emotionally destroyed when their team loses. When they are old, and physically inadequate to be an athlete any longer, they are mentally unprepared for the inevitability of moving from being a warrior, to membership in a community of old farts which is our ultimate destiny anyway.
I want something to communicate to people that who they are without their team logo is more important than who they think they are when they're wearing it. The thing that performs this function doesn't have to be music. actually, music usually isn't much better.
Music is usually considered something people do when the real work is finished so only girls can acceptably study it in school for the most part because they're going to get married and be supported by husbands, so it really doesn't matter what they do in school. At least that used to be the thinking if it can be called that. It is more likely the unconscious attitude.
The gender roles this communicates is not something I want students to learn. The students are also competing for positions in forms of music which would be basically dead without wealthy patrons including jazz and especially opera. In the early days of western musical practice, a person couldn't be a member of court unless they were highly trained in ballet, and classical music.
It was and still is for the wealthy to communicate their separation from the rest of the world with expensive instruments and lessons. Its an elitist proposition. This also does not help people live up to productive community membership, the same as sports.
The inadequate will drop out because being the best is placed higher in importance than community cohesiveness. People who succeed move out of the community and into a small clique, people who can't succeed, drop out or, thinking they can't succeed, never enter.
Rock music's influence is much like sports or video games. Students get their identities vicariously from rock groups (and martial arts video game characters) and wear their favorite band's logo on their clothes though the student in question often can't play a single note on a guitar (or even think of entering an actual Kung Fu tournament.) Rock music usually helps bolster the feeling of a student's independance from their parents but unfortunately not the actuality of at least interdependance.
How can we act creatively without contributing to the loss of community, degradation of the environment, wasting of resources, support of tyrannies, lawlessness and prejudice? Using wind and waves reflects a fondness for nature but this is not enough. How do we give people real direction?
How do we actually BUILD community and not just conserve the environment but ENRICH it?
In order to build community our music would need to involve instruments and styles that are easy or at least have several easy parts. It should reflect the characteristic of world citizenry, be inclusive and not elitist and introduce cultural elements in an unselfconscious manner. This entails a completely different mythology and aesthetic.
There are no enemies only a conflict of needs. Often, an enemy is more imagined than real. Even criminals are invited to participate in the limited way they can be because there is the potential their lives can be redeemed.
The metaphor for the scale does not have to be one of war and kings. Perhaps conflict could be seen as a dance toward compassionate understanding. There is no individual redemption without global redemption. If you retire to the woods sitting on a mountain of beans (or gold for that matter) or a hermitage meeting all your needs, the world's problems and the people who have them will come find you eventually.
We're interested in having kids, the elderly and the developmentally disabled participate with "normal" people in building community together. This can take the form of making music together not completely self indulgent introspection like Indian Classical music which generally offers no relationship with the neighbors.
I'm interested in environmental concerns and as such don't want to increase the demand for exotic hardwoods in instrument construction. Thankfully, the postmodernists expanded the idea of what constitutes a musical instrument. This has blown fresh air into a stuffy room. Instruments can be inexpensive, easy to acquire and play well.
Good instruments already can be acquired, made inexpensivley or free. So in keeping with voluntary simplicity some examples would be for schools or anybody to use 5 gallon plastic water bottles or galvanized garbage cans as drums. Garbage can lids can be ride cymbals.
Salt dispensers and toothpick vials could serve as shakers. In Cuba a brake "drum" taken from a car functions as the bell. A guitar or violin can be made from wire, a broom handle and a coffee can for a resonator.
Chimes can be made from nails of different sizes. The problem with the postmodernists is they didn't just let fresh air in, they also eliminated the room which needed it. We still need the form which the room provides, so weird or scrounged instruments are not the end all and be all of musical life.
The music can also be engineered to compliment a lifestyle harmonious with concerns for holistic health. I'm attracted to the healing capabilities of music and so am interested in the trance application of Gamelan music of Indonesia, the ecstatic Qawali singing of Persian music, the polyrythms of Africa (and therefore Voodoo as well), the music of Mongolian shamans and the Native American "medicine man." Although, altered states are not music's only healing capacity as music therapists will tell you.
Sufi mystics say that the mastery of trance states is not the goal of spirituality. In fact they can cause the spiritual aspirant to take a left turn onto a dead end road and end up with an addiction to them. This is not to say that they still don't use them.
Islam is very critical and suspicious of the value of music, almost the same as Christianity but that didn't stop the Sufi's from creating the ecstatic Qawali singing for moving closer to God. The Koran mentions music has ability to do this. The Sufi's took it seriously but they also take trance states very seriously.
They are not interested in being possessed by spirits who may be very lowly entities with impure intentions especially a person's own ego.
World music influences showing effective healing capability;
Gamelan instruments are played in pairs and tuned roughly a quarter step apart. This creates binaural beats which are in the range of the alpha or theta brain wave frequencies. This produces the shimmering quality of gamelan music and the healing frequency.
The scales derived from the Persian division of the octave have most of the notes tuned to "normal" but not all. Like the music of India, the Setar (not sitar) has two of its strings tuned to C and C1/4 sharp capable of producing the binaur beats. The setar is the prefered instrument of Sufi mystics.
The shaman often holds a rattle close to his head because the random multiple strikes occuring inside the rattle also affects brainwaves placing him or herself into an altered state or if shaken above the patient, putting them into the alpha or theta healing frequency.
The topical separation of the polyrhythms of Africa or the Interlocking drums of Indonesia and Cuba defines a ritual space by producing a confounding of expectations and paradoxically it is the imposition of order that cyclic drum rhythms make and the drums separation in spacethat produces a sense of timelessness and spacelessness assisting healing.
Western melody is very goal oriented. Gamelan melody is not like this and the musician's of Malaysia and Indonesia say their intent is to create a timeless feeling that puts the audience in a state half-awake and half-asleep.
The pelog scale in Bali, which began to be utilized after the Dutch invasion, was never an elitist music for the courts. It became popular very quickly and is a recent development. Persian music, though played in the courts was also the popular music of that culture having very few tinges of classism.
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