Computer Musician, Programmer, Hardware Hacker

Two new papers (an analysis of Florian Hecker‘s new Acid in the Style of David Tudor, and a history of David Tudor and John Cage’s collaboration and mutual influence) posted on the Research page.

Also posted the score .pdf for my new piece Pattern Recognition.

I stumbled across an essay on using improvisation in composed works by the French composer Vinko Globokar. Here’s the link, from the IIMA. Globokar did a lot of work integrating improvisation/reactive situations into composed music. His piece Correspondences is a great example of this. I found this article just as I’ve been struggling with similar issues in my current work.

This first sentence is quite telling:

The interdependence between composer and performer has nowadays become one of the fundamental problems in our music.

He writes of the desire to engage and involve the performer more deeply in a given work, by allowing them more of the responsibility than is traditionally given, but warns that this can compromise the aesthetics of the piece. (I think this can be overcome in a few ways, maybe most importantly by knowing your performers, but also by playing your own music.)

Globokar suggests a few techniques he uses to allow ‘improvisation’ in his works, without risking changes to his pieces. He defines five ways in which musicians can ‘react’ in a musical situation:

1. Imitation
2. Integrate Oneself
3. Hesitate
4. Doing The Opposite
5. Doing Something Different

Imitation is the most obvious, and I think ‘hesitate’ is maybe the least. It implies a sort of ‘disintegration’ of material, in which a player gradually breaks away from and eventually stops playing a given idea.

I think it’s important to note that although he uses the term ‘improvised’, he’s really referring to music that is primarily pre-composed, containing some parameters that are improvised or (more accurately) reactionary. An example of this (he gives a few) is a situation in which one performer has a set of pitches, and the other performers have to follow her pitches using their own prescribed rhythm. This creates a very interesting web of interdependence, and strikes me as a way to encourage a very active way listening in the performers.

He also writes a bit about the differences in writing this music for musicians with whom you’re familiar and comfortable with, and writing for yet unknown musicians.

He also leaves us with some direction:

Almost unexplored are moreover the various aspects offered by the reaction between performers. Even the relation: performer-performer – in which, for example, a performer, having material at his disposal which we have prescribed him in an incomplete form “searches for” the absent elements (which are, however, necessary if he wants to play) within the playing of his neighbour – yields extremely tense and engaged results. Even more interesting are the situations which oblige the performer to react simultaneously to the playing of two of his neighbours, thus having to analyse two materials at the same time.

It seems important today for us to create relations between performers in order that they should be tied more closely together, that they should be interdependent, that they should have the possibility of influencing each other. Exactly if we succeed in creating a variety of relations between them, not just musical ones but also psychologically, we arrive at making them interested in participating.

Finally, there are some good score examples, with explanatory notes. Go check it out, if you haven’t already. I also encourage looking at some of his scores, they’re beautifully hand-notated and generally pretty clear.

Edit: There appear to be quite a few interesting articles on similar (?) topics here.