LOADED DICE: Music Determined and Improvised

saturday, may 13, 2023

= program notes =

The arts may be crudely divided into performing arts and fine arts. Works of the fine arts, such as a painting or sculpture, are crafted and then continue to exist in a more or less fixed state. An observer comes to experience the work in its seemingly immutable condition, and the next person experiences the same thing, though naturally through the lens of their own nature and experience.
 
It may seem self-evident that the performing arts – dance, theater, music, and the like – require action in order to exist. At every performance, the art is there and then gone, like a waking dream, ceasing to exist except in memory. But what of the symbols that some performing artists use to communicate and record their ideas: lines of script for a play, or dots and lines on a piece of paper for dance and music? Is this the art itself, or merely an echo, a crude approximation?
 
For notated music, the kind of music that constitutes most if not all of the repertoire of “classically-oriented” ensembles such as Cecilia, the symbols on the page are the code, meant for persons known or unknown to the “coder,” for making music. The symbols can be specific or general, though one can argue that under no circumstances are such symbols an exact code for sound, like a mathematical formula can be exact (or at least ideal) to only varying degrees of precision. And since music is at least not fully a science, it is sometimes the case that the lack of precision is not an error, but an intent, on the part of the composer. Some may also be drawn to the idea that the scribbles themselves are more the music than any rendering in sound, the Platonic ideal of a thing that can never be achieved in the base reality of existence. (So it was in Medieval music theory and philosophy; sounding music was a crude approximation of the harmony of mathematical proportions in the heavens.)
 
Not all music, of course, is notated. Music is made, survives, and evolves by other means: through oral traditions passed down and changing through the generations, and by various schools and techniques of improvisation. Though perhaps not apparent at first glance, improvisation is neither random nor left up to chance. It is generally a studied practice, relying on norms of behavior and a library of ideas that may be drawn upon. Just as an improv comic doesn’t usually make random noises on stage, but rather strings together more or less coherent ideas, so does the improvising musician concatenate learned building blocks into a string of ideas that, in their ordering at least, may have never yet been heard.
 
Chance operations, on the other hand, hand off the responsibility of sound production to the universe, as it were. A composer may, for example, tie the order of the sections of a musical composition to the results of the roll of a die or the drawing of a certain playing card. Yet chance can operate on other, often unspoken levels. The spontaneous interpretive nuance of one performer may lead others to make different choices in their own interpretations. This phenomenon is essential to the sound meditations of Pauline Oliveros, two of which you will hear today.
 
Sometimes the code used to generate the piece is foregrounded, i.e. audible and comprehensible to the listener, perhaps after a bit of explaining. Such is the case with the so-called tintinnabular works of Arvo Pärt. Quite often the text is the point of departure, on the fundamental level of syllable count and stress. Pärt then applies a set of formulas that tie basic musical decisions, like pitch and duration, to those features of his chosen text.
 
Pärt has proven to be an extremely popular composer, and it is worth asking why. Is it the ability of most listeners, either consciously or unconsciously, to “look under the hood” and understand the processes at work? Is it the almost inevitable repetition that is generated from his algorithms, lending, as if often cited, a hypnotic quality to his style? Is it that the text matters, but not in the way one might expect?

We will explore other angles of determinedist, composed music, including techniques far more ancient than the tintinnabular style, such as canon (Brahms and Byrd) and isorhythm (Du Fay). In all, we hope to offer a glimpse into the vast spectrum of possibilities, historical and modern, for how sound may be planned or unplanned, both before and during a performance.

— Michael Barrett