Form and freedom: the marriage of musical systems and intuition. A commentary with accompanying compositions submitted to the faculty of the School of Arts, Brunel University in fulfillment of requirements for the degree of PhD in music composition research by Nicholas Gotham, January 4, 2012, revised February 19, 2013. 1 Contents Chapter Contents Page Acknowledgements 3 1 Introduction 5 2 The Life of Things 18 3 Asleep in a Field 21 4 Strategy 23 5 Every Day 27 6 Truth in Darkness 31 7 SimfoNiMo: Zones, James In Peril, Bolero 33 8 Equilibria 40 9 Stand, Spin, Jump 42 10 Nightscapes - a chamber symphony 47 11 Conclusions 56 References 60 Notes 62 List of appended scores 63 Appendix: Texts of the vocal works 64 2 Acknowledgements My primary thesis supervisor at the Brunel University Department of Music was Prof. Christopher Fox. His timely and sensitive advice has been invaluable at every stage of this work. Thanks also for his valuable comments to Prof. Richard Barrett. At several points in this commentary, I have referred to the music and theoretical writings of the late James Tenney, with whom I studied for several years in Toronto and whose ideas seem to grow more important to me the longer I work as a composer. That my own music so little resembles Tenney’s in most respects speaks of the broad relevance, potency and applicability of his ideas. My heartfelt thanks to my wife Baņuta Rubess, who has encouraged and enabled me in my work for many years, including those that have resulted in the present work. For the past several years, I have benefited from the strong musical traditions and lively musical atmosphere of Riga, Latvia. Many of the works discussed in this commentary were commissioned and performed by excellent Latvian ensembles. For their interest in my work, for their musicality and professionalism, and our enjoyable collaboration, I would like to thank the Latvian Radio Choir, Sinfonietta Riga, the Riga Professional Wind Orchestra, the vocal ensemble Putni, the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, and the following individuals: Artis Sīmanis, Normunds Šnē, Andris Poga, Kaspars Putniņš, Ilona Breģe and Sigvards Kļava. For his artistry and our creative friendship, thanks to Uldis Cirulis, a.k.a. DJ Monsta. 3 Form and freedom: the marriage of musical systems and intuition Abstract This thesis includes an Introduction, which explains some of the ideas and procedures involved in a series of compositions I produced during the period from October, 2008 through November, 2011, a discussion of the works themselves individually and in roughly the same chronological order in which they were composed, and a summary of Conclusions which may be drawn. Included as an Appendix are texts for reference while listening to the vocal works. Complete scores of the works with representative recordings make up the main body of the thesis, except in the case of the solo piano suite Equilibria, where the score is included but the work remained unrecorded at the time of submission. Ideas discussed include some which unite or distinguish the processes of musical improvisation with/from more methodical modes of composition. Also the theme of musical collaboration is considered in contrast to the notion of the composer who works – or appears to work – in isolation. Research into traditions of music is regarded as important to compositional practice overall. Among the Conclusions is that my own orientation to these ideas places me in the category of post-minimalist composers. Throughout this discussion I have involved commentary from other relevant and important thinkers, critics and composers. 4 Introduction This commentary will explain some of the ideas and procedures involved in a series of compositions I produced during the period from October, 2008 through November, 2011. I will emphasize those ideas that are persistent throughout the works, though the compositions themselves are quite different from each other. Primarily, the music and this commentary constitute an inquiry into some special characteristics of the process of formal composition as practiced by an experienced improviser, where the object has been first to create a secure framework in which a freer, more “improvisational” mode of composition can then take place. This approach affirms that a cohesive clarity of form and a sense of spontaneity are both desirable qualities in a piece of music. Most of the works discussed below share this approach, but applied and achieved in various ways. With the aim of establishing a context for this work within the landscape of contemporary music, the commentary includes a short discussion of post-minimalism in music. In the works discussed, certain strict compositional methods are shown to be derived from minimalism, whereas other features of the music fall clearly outside, or “post-”, minimalistic influence. A clarification of various senses of the term improvisation and ideas around the relationship(s) between improvisation and formal composition also make up part of the discussion. Finally, in assessing my own artistic practice, the great degree to which the work was collaborative struck me as significant. Accordingly, I will discuss various types, levels and degrees of musical collaboration, from music that is entirely improvised by groups of two or more musicians and is therefore collaborative in its essence, through to music that appears to be entirely the work of a sole composer but which I consider collaborative on a certain level. The consideration and comparison of improvisation and formal composition offer one way of unifying a field of musical practice across the immense and bewildering diversity of styles, traditions and genres that characterizes contemporary musical life. This is clear, for example, in Derek Bailey’s book Improvisation: its nature and practice in music 5 (1992) where the author examines the practice of improvisation in each of: European classical organ-playing and the Baroque continuo, flamenco, Indian classical music, rock and roll, contemporary composition, jazz and free improvisation in the book’s several chapters. Bailey’s book, inclusive as it as is of so many styles and traditions, deals with improvisation understood as music performance without benefit of a notated score or parts and which relies primarily on performers rather than composers. In a section on improvisation and composition, Bailey comments on the relationship between the two from the improviser’s point of view: The debate about how composition can best utilize improvisation, while of interest to the composers concerned, is of only peripheral interest, not to say irrelevant, to some players. (Bailey 1997: 79) One way in which composition can utilize improvisation is via research, by examining the practice of music improvisation to determine ways in which it might inform or nourish composition. The view put forward in this commentary is that definitions of “composition” and “improvisation” are in fact porous and their practice can be seen to overlap in most cases. As Derek Bailey points out, improvisation in some form – basso continuo, ornamentation or cadenzas, for example – was a constant characteristic of European classical music until 1800, and even Richard Wagner embraced improvisation, conceptually at least, so long as it was only the composer himself who did the improvising: As Wagner puts it in The Destiny of Opera, the ‘most perfect form of art’ would be a “mimetic-musical improvisation of consummate poetic value fixed by the finest artistic judgement”. (Peters 2009: 91) Certain developments in 20th century music such as, for example, serialism applied to virtually all musical parameters, have required an even greater “fixity” or prescriptive specificity in the composed score than has ever been the case in all of music’s history 6 until now. Concurrent with the trajectory of serialism in European-American “serious music”, was the rise of jazz as the most potent locus of improvisation in music and the American art form par excellence. By the end of the 20th century, therefore, the debate, dialogue or relationship between composition and improvisation remained very polarized despite the efforts of some musicians and theorists. Although improvisation will be an important reference point in this discussion, almost no actual improvisation is involved in the performance of the works to be discussed (with certain exceptions). Rather, a focus of the discussion will be on relative degrees of pre- planning and schematization of form versus a quasi-improvisatory, intuitive or spontaneous mode of note-to-note composition in each project. Accordingly, I will use the term improvisation here in a special sense referring to the way a composer can be said to be improvising if and as they compose without having prepared the note-to-note method of a work’s composition. Where such preparation has taken place, I will describe it in detail as an opposite and complementary sort of activity to improvisation. In seeking to align compositional and improvisational principles and practices, I have often looked especially for ways in which preparation can facilitate an improvisatory mode of note-to- note composition later in the process, and the compositions presented here feature various solutions to this particular problem. If we disregard what particular tool is in a musician’s hands at a given moment – whether it’s a pencil, computer, baton, violin or saxophone – the most significant distinction between composition and improvisation has to do with time: composition is a longer, more considered process, while improvisation is held to be instantaneous. The composer, as they write, is often looking back at past ideas in the music or forward at some idea planned for the future, while the improviser must stay as much as possible “in the moment”. Here again, a beneficial view of music-making might include both orientations, so that we can imagine an instantaneous mode of composition on one hand, and a considered, even well prepared mode of improvisation on the other. Although he was often dismissive or derisory in his comments about improvisation per se, Morton 7 Feldman’s example is apposite: He emphasized that the activity of composition must always strive for alert listening, for being present in the moment. He often compared the composer’s working state of mind to that not of an improvising musician but of a tennis player, who must always be supremely alert to their opponent’s movements (Feldman 1985: 173). In this way, the game “develops” independently of either player’s preparation or intentions or, rather, the best preparation the composer can undertake, like the improviser or the tennis player, is to train their powers of concentration, perceptive skills and quick responses. This is not unlike the practice of the “action painters” Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose work and ideas Feldman embraced, but it is also similar to that of jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker, whose work he did not. I will be concentrating in this discussion on the composer’s practice and point of view – especially on the degree to which improvisation bears on composition at various levels – but an important implication of the various relationships I will describe between composition and improvisation is that, even in the “freest” improvisatory situations, the improviser applies principles and strategies that can properly be called compositional. In other words, even where no formal planning has taken place, the improvising musician might bring to their activity an internalized and more or less conscious set of organizing skills and tendencies that ensures the coherence of the music on some or all levels. There are, in this sense, both improvisatory and compositional aspects in various degrees and relations to be found in all music. In the works discussed here and in all my work to this point, I have tended to consider improvisational and compositional aspects both separately and together in order to gain a rounded view of what I’m doing and to gain the benefit of both orientations, bringing them as much as possible into a coordinated, fruitful correlation. Gavin Bryars is a notable example of a composer with a deep background in improvisation. His music was in my mind especially during the composition of these works (The Life of Things and Asleep In a Field) for the Latvian Radio Choir – a group 8 with whom Bryars has himself collaborated. After working very intensively in an improvising collective that included the percussionist Tony Oxley and guitarist Derek Bailey for some years, Bryars chose very decisively in the mid 1960’s to end his involvement with improvisation and concentrate exclusively on fixed composition. For Bryars, the two orientations, that of the improviser and of the composer, were incompatible, as he explained in an interview with Derek Bailey: “One of the reasons I am against improvisation now is that in any improvising position the person creating the music is identified with the music. The two things are seen to be synonymous... And because of that the music, in improvisation, doesn’t stand alone. It’s corporeal. My position, through the study of Zen and Cage, is to stand apart from one’s creation. Distancing yourself from what you are doing. Now that becomes impossible in improvisation. If I write a piece I don’t even have to be there when it is played. They are conceptions. I’m more interested in conception than reality. Because I can conceive of things that don’t have any tangible reality. But if I’m playing them, if I’m there at the same time, then that’s real. It’s not a conception.” (Bailey 1993: 115) In my own compositional practice, I am quite aware of the “distanced” attitude Bryars describes. The early phases of a composition require precisely the setting aside of personal, expressive “content” in order to focus on the conceptual, formal aspects of the music. At a later point, when the structural underpinnings of the works are well established, expressive content takes its part in the process. It is worth noting that any short sample of Bryars’ music will be immediately recognizable as his, so there must be a sense in which the distance between the composer and his “conceptions” has closed after all. The same may be said of the music of John Cage himself. There is, apparently, a degree of conflation of the person creating the music with the music itself even in Bryars’ and Cage’s case. Nonetheless, the “distancing” serves to avoid the intrusion of unwanted or extraneous elements into the music, the musical habits or mannerisms of an individual composer which can work against the conceptual integrity of the music. Closely related to improvisation, the idea of collaboration is one that runs throughout the works to be discussed. I will explain how the collaborative aspect of improvisation has 9 affected my compositional practice, considering degrees and types of collaboration and their specific importance to each work. The various collaborative relationships discussed below include: composer/co-composer(s), composer/performer, composer/text author, composer/performer/producer/audience, and internalized, “virtual” versions of these relationships that the composer has held in mind as guidelines during the creative process. These ideas about musical collaboration – both real and virtual – relate to the frequent question of for whom we compose, famously answered by Milton Babbitt in his essay Who cares if you listen? (1958). For Babbitt, avant-garde music is composed in the name of and for the benefit of the advancement or progress of music itself, and any consideration of the audience, performers or even fellow composers must be set aside. His essay was a plea for an academic, institutional refuge for practitioners of advanced, specialized music in the face of public indifference or opprobrium. My own stance is that, to some extent, the composer/improviser internalizes an audience – albeit sometimes an ideally informed and sympathetic one – in order to be able to “hear” or imagine their music with some degree of objectivity as they compose. Here, the distinction between myself (the composer) and them (the audience) is redundant. Even as I sit alone in my room composing, I know that the entire process will eventually involve many other people, perhaps has already involved them, and this knowledge is essential to my practice as a musician. For me, composition is collaborative by its nature. Other creative intelligences besides my own are always contributing to the process. This situation, I believe, no less accurately describes that of Milton Babbitt in his institute of advanced musical research. But the issue of collaboration in music becomes quite complex. I would like to comment here on another point of distinction – a socio-political one – between musical processes which involve a composer or composers as such and those that do not. The basic question here is: Does the composer occupy a position of power? In situations where roles such as composer, performer, conductor or soloist are filled by separate individuals, 10