Open Bach

For as much as I love, have written about, and continue to listen and perform the music of John Cage, I'm equally drawn to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, in many ways Cage's polar opposite. Cage composed with chance operations, and some of my favorite Cage works (like the number pieces) produce sound events differently at every performance, epitomizing what has come to be called "open form." Bach's music presents an inexorable logic, to the point with his fugues where the harmonic and contrapuntal possibilities are contained within the first few measures, which might be considered the ultimate closed form.

Yet Cage selected Bach's The Art of Fugue as an early example of indeterminate music in his lecture "Composition as Process" because it was originally published as an open score, each voice on its own stave and with the instrumentation unspecified. "Timbre and amplitude characteristics of the material, by not being given, are indeterminate," he wrote. "This indeterminacy brings about the possibility of a unique overtone structure and decibel range for each performance of The Art of Fugue." And indeed, contemporary recordings of the work exist for orchestra, keyboard (piano, harpsichord and organ), string quartet, wind quintet, saxophone quartet, and many other combinations. Despite a now prevailing scholarly opinion that The Art of Fugue was written for keyboard, its open score has seemingly licensed a timbral imagination that exceeds the normal orchestral transcriptions that one finds for Bach's organ works. (The orchestral versions of The Art of Fugue that I've heard are in fact relatively colorless compared to, say, Schoenberg's transcription of the St. Anne Prelude and Fugue or Webern's magnificent transcription of the ricercar from A Musical Offering.) And I confess, I have embarked on my own set of realizations on the computer, having completed four of the set to date, half simulating acoustic instruments and half for overtly synthetized sources.

One of the most commonly known trivia about The Art of Fugue is that the last fugue in the set, a quadruple fugue erroneously entitled "fuga a tre soggetti" (fugue on three subjects) in the first edition, was unfinished at Bach's death in 1750. The first edition, published by Bach's sons a few years later, closes with the music trailing off into nowhere and a note in the handwriting of C. P. E. Bach, "N.B. While working on this fugue, in which the name BACH appears in the countersubject, the author died." The vast majority of The Art of Fugue recordings perpetuate this message, breaking off in mid-phrase. The first editors stuck in a chorale that Bach dictated from his deathbed to terminate The Art of Fugue, but it's clearly unrelated to the rest of the work and therefore seldom recorded.

In a gesture that might be seen as hubris, some musicians and scholars have attempted to complete this fugue. My love of Bach was instilled by the English composer, musicologist and critic Donald Francis Tovey, whose 1924 edition of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier includes detailed and entertaining commentaries for each piece. This edition, still in print from the Royal Schools of Music in London, was the first Bach music I studied, and his commentary was as much a part of the education as learning the music. I knew Tovey had published a completion in 1931, but it's fairly difficult to locate even though his monograph Companion to The Art of Fugue is available at many used book shops (generally for an exorbitant price). After several unsuccessful attempts at obtaining Tovey's completion through inter-library loan, I finally located one fairly cheap from a used bookseller in England, and it's now part of my library. Tovey wasn't the only one to attempt a completion of Bach's final fugue. Probably the most well-known version is by the composer and virtuoso pianist Ferruccio Busoni. Busoni actually incorporated the whole fugue into his Fantasia Contrappuntistica, a massive twelve-part piano piece published in 1910. I've got a recording of the piece, and it sounds a lot more like Busoni than Bach, and I'm a bit repelled by the piece's virtuosic nature.

The most recent scholarly research puts forward that Bach was considerably more open about The Art of Fugue than even Cage had thought, specifically that Bach deliberately left the final fugue unfinished as a puzzle for performers to complete. Bach left us other puzzles, including but not limited to the "quaerendo invenietis" canons from The Musical Offering. Printed on a single stave but with two clefs, a tenor clef right side up and a bass clef upside down, Bach's directive to "seek and ye shall find" incites two performers facing each other across the score to devise a solution. An organist from New Zealand, Indra Hughes, uses numerology, handwriting analysis, and solid detective evidence to support his thesis that Bach had a solution to the final fugue, which I find fairly compelling. Bach wrote many of his works for didactic purposes, and Hughes suggests that The Art of Fugue belongs in large measure in this category, a compendium of fugal technique, so that the completion of the final fugue was left as an exercise for the students.

Tovey and Busoni may be the most celebrated final fugue finishers, but recent years have seen other performers release their own completions. The Henle edition of The Art of Fugue was edited by harpsichordist Davitt Moroney, who includes his version. Organist Michael Ferguson from St. Paul, Minnesota, published one and has included it in an organ recording of the entire The Art of Fugue. The Hungarian composer and organist Zoltàn Göncz also used higher mathematics to demonstrate its permutational matrix. His version of the score comes with an endorsement from Györgi Ligeti, who taught counterpoint and fugal technique. Hughes' thesis doesn't include a completion, but he extends the numerological analysis to show how long he thinks the completion should be, along with where the four themes should show up, both normal and inverted.

So, as I hinted three years ago, my summer project is an orchestration of this final fugue. It's one of Bach's longest fugues, so I still have plenty of time to decide whose completion I'll use — I've always been curious to hear Tovey's. But who knows, maybe I'll compose my own….

Another view on composition

An ongoing theme of this blog is the nature of a musical work, especially in light of the radical modifications to that concept since World War II. Most of the musicians I've discussed in this context so far have come from the classical tradition, with its strict dichotomy of score and performance. Jazz comes from a completely different background, yet its contrasting compositional practice has approached a parallel that has much in common with Cage and Wolff, despite obvious differences in musical language and instrumental techniques. Graham Collier's recent book, The Jazz Composer: Moving Music Off The Paper, acts like a frame for a consideration of classical open form works, a boundary between two completely different traditions that reveals an unusual perspective on graphic and open scores.

One shared characteristic is that compositions are written with specific performers in mind. Jazz band leaders starting with Duke Ellington (Collier's pioneering example of a jazz composer) wrote their music with the individual characteristics of their players in mind. Similarly for the classical avant-garde, many composers had performer-muses whose unique musical talent contributed to some kind of virtuosic breakthrough (Cage and Tudor, Berio and Berberian). We wouldn't have anywhere near the amount of piano music from the avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s without David Tudor. But the downside was that the composer wouldn't always get the imagined and desired results. Stockhausen wrote his open works in the 1960s with his ensemble in mind, and complained when his intuitive music was performed badly by others. Morton Feldman reportedly quit writing scores on graph paper because they were so often poorly interpreted.

Feldman's experience is a reminder that music is created by the people playing it, that it can be played well or poorly, but it must be performed to be experienced. While this statement may be a tautology to a jazz fan, it's one of the biggest differences between jazz and classical composition; the latter grants compositions an independent existence and generally higher value than performances thereof. It's true that classical compositions have an intricate set of relationships that can be expressed notationally, and studied both as a compositional example and for spectator appreciation. Open form compositions are often closer to the jazz perspective than the classical one, where the audible results are all there is, without some imagined ideal creating the shadow on the wall. The classical paradigm permits these scores to be published and thereby made available to other performers, who may have no direct connection to the composer. Having improvisation at its core, jazz has not progressed down the publication path, so our only examples of jazz scores are those that the composers choose to share, generally on his or her website. Transcriptions of jazz performances are very common, but not to be confused with the original compositions, and meaningless for an understanding of the nature of the work itself.

Collier states at the outset that for jazz composers, all that matters is the performance. Some classical open scores are beautiful pictures in and of themselves — I have pages from Cage's Concert for piano framed and hanging in my studio. But despite admiration for visual scores like Takemitsu's Corona, the whole point is to inspire the performer to create a performance that could not be obtained any other way. Cage deliberately composed so that he could be surprised by the results, accepting the risk that the surprise might not be pleasant. We're also distracted by looking for form in open scores, when the form is what is audible in the results. In jazz as well as contemporary classical, the target audience of an open form composition is the performer, who must put his own substantial creativity and vision into the results to create a meaningful statement for an audience (even if the audience is only the performer himself).

Some of Collier's other elements, such as appropriate space for musical events, and levels of interaction that divide the listener's attention, are applicable to a lot of the music on my shelves. Markedly, they don't apply to testosterone-laden bop solos, always in the same order and over an unvarying rhythm section, designed to show off instrumentalist's technical chops. He has considerably more sympathy with classical composers than a jazz language that was surpassed definitively in 1959 when Miles Davis released Kind of Blue, epitomizing what Collier calls "the revolutionary decade." Gil Evans, Ornette Coleman, and Charles Mingus are the other stars from this seminal period. Collier acknowledges their influences for his own compositions, which he uses to illustrate some of the specifics (with audio examples at the book's website). Paralleling his disdain for most contemporary mainstream jazz figures, few other living composers other than Coleman and himself get more than a passing allusion.

In addition to the technical material, The Jazz Composer is entertaining because of Collier's polemics. He despises the reactionary jazz stance taken by Wynton Marsalis and others connected with the uptown Lincoln Center version of "Jazz," and anyone who wants to put jazz performances in a museum. He tackles jazz education as one of the primary culprits in maintaining bop in its privileged position. He confronts many of the jazz prejudices head on, addressing biases against Europeans, gays and women. Amusing sidebars aside, Collier writes as a practitioner, from the inside, addressing musical topics beyond the insular world of jazz.

Seven days, forty years ago

In a recent interview at Paris Transatlantic, composer/improviser Richard Barrett commented that Stockhausen's recordings of his text compositions, From The Seven Days (Aus den Sieben Tagen), "represent one of the pinnacles of achievement in improvised music," a remark which has generated a fair amount of discussion on the IHM forum. I've expressed my great admiration for these recordings before, but the IHM discussion has prompted me to listen to them all again.

Stockhausen wrote the fifteen texts that comprise From the Seven Days during a period of intense personal crisis in May, 1968, parallel with a highly turbulent moment in European history. They were his first foray into purely text-based compositions, although since 1964 he had been touring with his ensemble on compositions more and more sparse in their construction. As far as I can tell, the first public performance of any of the works was in December, 1968, when Stockhausen and his touring group, augmented by a couple of Parisian musicians, played It in a concert in Brussels. In May, 1969, he performed Set Sail for the Sun in Paris during a series of concerts dedicated to his work, and recorded this piece and Connection for the Harmonia Mundi label (still available digitally from the usual sources, although credited to Diego Masson and the Ensemble Musique Vivante). Later that summer, at the annual Darmstadt composition school, he recorded, concertized, and lectured on eleven of the pieces, recordings that were later issued on Deutsche Grammophon LPs and which are currently available as a seven CD set on Stockhausen's own label. (The set also includes a recording of Gold Dust which was made in 1972 with a different ensemble.)

Starting at the beginning of the series, one quickly becomes aware of Stockhausen's vocalising. Stockhausen was a musical visionary and a great composer, but I've always had a hard time with his vocals in these pieces. In Right Durations he chants and murmurs through the background, but in Downwards he really hogs the microphone, declaiming the text of the piece in multiple languages and making various other subvocal noises. The music is generally interesting enough to overlook the occasional chants in other pieces, but in the recording of Unlimited, one of longest intuitive music recordings he made, he reads a text by Sri Aurobindo during the entire piece. In July, 1969, Stockhausen and his group performed Unlimited for an entire evening at an outdoor concert in St. Paul de Vence , but hopefully it was less tedious than this accompanied lecture. I can't see a rationale in the instructions for this reading, but perhaps he had taken an inspiration from John Cage, who had most likely brought the scores to his 10,000 things pieces to Cologne in 1960. This was a collection of timed pieces for pianists, string players and percussionists which could be performed simultaneously, and included 45' for a speaker. But Cage's subject matter was considerably more fragmented and less preachy than Aurobindo's spiritual text, and Cage did not always intend for the speaker to be understood, more of a texture than a message.

The spiritual message exemplified in Unlimited is the most prominent theme of the text pieces. It is the aspect that received the most press at the time, and the foundation of the attraction of the recordings to myself and probably many other listeners during the culture shock years around 1970. One of the other spiritual expressions is a direction to seek other rhythms to play, which shows up in five of the twelve pieces selected for recording. Downwards, for example, directs the players to play vibrations in the rhythms of your cells, molecules and atoms, while Night Music seeks the rhythms of the universe and of dreaming. These texts generally define a number of different rhythms which the performer should play individually, then transform and interchange them one for another. Many commentators have understood these directions as an extension of Stockhausen's serial thinking as expressed in his writings in the 1950s, e.g., "the basic conception may have become clear: first of all, to arrange everything separate into as smooth a continuum as possible, and then to extricate the diversities from this continuum and compose with them."* But the 1960s were long past any overt interest that Stockhausen had for serial thinking; instead, his composed work was in what he called moment form, "states and processes in which every moment is something personal and centered; something that can exist on its own, which as something individual always can be related to its surroundings and to the entire work."** A vague definition perhaps, but more in keeping with the spiritual aspects of the work. And the intuitive music sounds a lot more like Stockhausen's moment form works, such as Kontakte, a fully composed piece from 1958, than it does like his early serial ones.

And ultimately, it's the sound of these works that still holds Barrett's interest as well as my own. Simon Reynell commented very astutely about this in the IHM thread, which has prompted me to ponder this question more closely. Stockhausen gets an electronic sound even when most of the ensemble is playing acoustic instruments, and the overall electronics are really primitive. This tendency is very evident on the first recording of It, which is performed entirely on acoustic instruments (depending on what you consider a shortwave radio). Of course, Stockhausen encouraged the performers to explore timbral possibilities, so the sounds themselves are unusual. He made sure that the performers took occasional timeouts, which caused the overall textures to evolve. Another defining characteristic is the ensemble's use of percussion and very short sounds from non-percussion instruments. Stockhausen had always been interested in points of sound, and this texture is used a lot in these pieces, to the point where melodic instruments play percussive sounds. For example, one of the few electronic instruments was a viola with contact microphone, and Johannes Fritsch played short, rough, pizzicato sounds, which Stockhausen probably filtered to sound even stranger. But it is the similarity in general phrasing and texture between the intuitive music and passages in Kontakte and Procession that I find striking, so that it is completely fair to say that Stockhausen used the intuitive music to create new Stockhausen music, and to do it more quickly than the fully composed works. And he was only able to do so because he had been extensively touring with these musicians for five years, playing his graphic scores. In these scores, not only were the directions a clear precedent for the directions in the intuitive music, but the earliest one, Procession, specifically directed the performers to transform and interchange fragments of Stockhausen's notated music. This also explains why no other ensembles who plays these scores produce anything like Stockhausen music (although the Swiss new music group Le Car du Thon has made some very nice recordings freely available).

Stockhausen composed a further seventeen texts that were published as For Times To Come (Für Kommende Zeit) in 1970, but these pieces are performed much less frequently. Even Stockhausen's label has only released recordings for seven of the texts, six of which are fairly recent; only one of the five recordings from this set that Stockhausen made in the 1970s are among the reissues. Stockhausen's music changed completely in the early 1970s, away from the collaborative work with his ensemble in the 1960s and returning to fully notated works, away from the pointillism of the 1950s toward a new love of melody as exhibited in the first major work of the new decade, Mantra. By the end of the 1970s, he turned his attention to a different seven days, his massive week-long opera Light (Licht), and the intuitive music experiment was well behind him. Given Stockhausen's reported autocratic personality, it was inevitable that he would want to regain sole ownership of the composer's chair, but at least we have the recordings, fascinating documents today as they were forty years ago.

* Music and Speech, in Die Reihe, number 6, page 64, paraphrased by Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen.

** Stockhausen, Texte I, page 250, cited by Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music, page 207.

Stockhausen photo from the Stockhausen Verlag.

Corona

My article on Toru Takemitsu's visionary graphic score Corona for Pianists has been published at Néojaponisme. I had originally intended to post it here since it dovetails with many of my recent posts about open form, but it overlaps nicely with Néojaponisme's interest in creative endeavors outside of established genres.

Wolff piano

Christian Wolff is probably best known as an associate of John Cage and the composer of open works such as Edges and Burdocks, predecessors of John Zorn's game pieces, with scores that assemble instructions for performer interaction rather than straight musical notation. He has written more straightforward works, although little that could be called conventional. His compositional career is well into its sixth decade, and his pieces cover a fairly wide stylistic range within the general sound world of the classical American avant-garde.

Steffen Schleiermacher's album of Wolff's early piano music, released last year on the Swiss label hat[now]ART, encompasses three different styles of Wolff's compositions from the 1950s. In his earliest work, he restricted his sound palette considerably, using an extremely limited number of pitches and specific dynamic indications for each note. This style is represented here by For Prepared Piano from 1951 (whose four pieces use seven, eleven, eleven, and nine notes respectively) and For Piano I from 1952 (which uses nine notes). Wolff was enraptured early on by Anton Webern's pointillistic style — his only formal study was with Cage, and they analyzed Webern's Symphony together — and these sparse complexes punctuate the surrounding silence. For Prepared Piano hews closely to this ideal, with single notes or chords standing alone. Only in the last of its four movements do we hear anything connected, and these gestures are still fairly sparse. For Piano I puts its nine notes, through short but complex and carefully notated rhythmic sequences, with each note given its own dynamic indication. It was one of the few times Wolff used the I Ching (which Cage had famously adopted) for musical composition, and the goal was to allow the silence to appear "free from willful rhetoric."

By the middle of the decade, Wolff had lifted these pitch restrictions and used intricate (and inaudible) structural devices to produce an even more discontinuous sound. For Piano II from 1953 deliberately uses all 88 keys, and although the piece doesn't use tone rows, it reminds me of a phantom serial work from the period, where half of the notes have been filtered away. Wolff continues to use silence, but he allows the performer more liberties with fewer dynamic specifications and no tempo markings. Schleiermacher's performance still emphasizes the pointillist textures with abrupt dynamic changes, but Wolff's later interest in melody is not apparent here. The other two works from this period, For Piano With Preparations (from 1957) and Suite I (from 1954, also for prepared piano) add timbral complexities to the mix, and show how Wolff's handling of piano preparation was so different from Cage's. Where Cage would typically only use the prepared notes in a piece, Wolff uses the preparations to add color to what is otherwise a straightforward keyboard piece. In the three-movement Suite I, the first movement doesn't use any prepared tones at all, gradually introducing them into the second and third movements subtly to alter the piano sounds.

The final stage represented on this album uses Wolff's cueing system rather than notes. He had written two piano duos to play with Frederic Rzewski, and in 1959 he wrote For Pianist, a solo piece using the same cue notation as the Duos. It is a wonderously imaginative rethinking of the role of composition. The score has eleven loose-leaf pages, but with a sly sense of humor anticipating Monty Python's Bruces rules, page five is an inset into a corner of page six, and page eight? There is no page eight. Wolff provides six pitch classes, containing five, three, five, five, thirty-four, and five pitches respectively, and a given instruction block will say how many pitches and from which class (or from none) should sound in a specified time. The directions may specify to alter the pitches, up or down a half step, one or more octaves, or both. Sounds may be played normally, manually dampened to produce harmonics, plucked with the fingertip or finger nail (two different specifications), scraped, or played so quietly as to activate the hammers but otherwise silently. Any number of pages may be played in any sequence, possibly more than once, but after any unwanted sound, the pianist must go immediately to page six.

Here's an example (click to enlarge). Numbers before the colon are for times. Indications after the colon are what should happen during that time. At the left, simultaneously, in 1.54 seconds play two notes from pitch class C, one of them pizzicato, and in a quarter second, play 4 notes from pitch class E transposed up or down one or more octaves, followed by 1.25 seconds of silence. The end of the system on the right shows how Wolff specifies an action and what happens if it's successful or not.

Wolff still specifies periods of silence between the directions, so there is a clear continuity with the other pieces in this set, but with all of the different timbral possibilities, it is a much more colorful piece. It may also reflect an influence from Wolff's new musical partner, Rzewski, whose background in improvisation may have stimulated Wolff's musical direction in a way that the virtuosic David Tudor, for whom he wrote all the other pieces here, did not.

Schleiermacher's release contains the same pieces as the first disc in John Tilbury's two-disc set released in 2002 on Matchless, with Tilbury also including a disc of the early works for two pianists (with Wolff on the second piano). Schleiermacher's recording has a slightly greater dynamic range, and he orders the pieces to alternate the prepared piano pieces, making a more diverse listening experience (Tilbury's program is in straight chronological order). Wolff wrote the liner notes for Schleiermacher's release, and Michael Parsons wrote the notes for Tilbury's. Interestingly, even though Schleiermacher's album came out last year, it was recorded in 2000, over a year before Tilbury's recordings. Other than to point out these superficial differences, there is no point in trying to determine whether one of these recordings is "better" than the other. Even the more fully notated works contain seeds of indeterminacy, not only in the dynamics, but in how the pianist chooses to break up various impossible combinations of keys. For music of this nature, more recordings and more performances, especially of the caliber of these two pianists, is always welcome.

Christian Wolff's music is a preeminent illustration of the open works that I've discussed on this blog before. In an essay written in 1960, Wolff asserted that his work stopped and started based on the actions of the performers, a theatrical event completely unrelated to the sounds of the piece. "That form ... can be derived out of the nature of the sound material is, I think, illusory." In a comment to my previous post, on Thomas Bernhard, Jon took issue with my comparison of Bernhard's prose to drones, hearing more of a circling around the same material, and always pushing forward. Perhaps Wolff's music is a more apt comparison. It's static in the sense that Jonathan Kramer defined vertical music, which has no clear hierarchy or defined goals in the same way that one finds in tonal music.

One of the other characteristics of open forms that I've noted before is that the target audience is not so much the listener as the performer. In an 1991 interview, Wolff admits, "I was writing for performers and myself. The kind of music we were making clearly was not popular in any sense whatsoever. There wasn't much point in worrying about the whole question of the audience." Although I'm writing about recordings here, my fascination with Wolff comes from studying the scores, thinking about how one might prepare to play them. His music has a wider appeal than many of his contemporaries because it expands to a much broader audience of performers who are interested in unorthodox methods of musical communication. Indie rock group Sonic Youth has released recordings of Edges and Burdocks, and another version of Burdocks appears on John Zorn's Tzadik label with an ensemble including Wolff, Fred Frith, Bob Ostertag, and William Winant. The Seattle Improv Meeting met monthly for three years, including Wolff among the composers they regularly tackled (and they have a number of recordings posted as well).

Early Piano Pieces is available from a number of distributors around the world, all of which are listed on the Hat site. Neither of the recordings discussed here is available as a legal download, although David Tudor's recording of For Piano I and Frederic Rzewski's recording of For Pianist, both from a long out-of-print Wergo LP, are both available at the Avant Garde Project.

The excerpt from For Pianist is from the score published by Edition Peters.

Historical listening

Recently I stumbled across Peter Szendy's Listen: A History of our Ears through a recent interview with the translator, Charlotte Mandell (worth reading in its own right). His sensuous book inquires into the rights of listeners, who has the right to music, and what a listener can do with music. The discussion leads from the evolving history of copyright to arrangements and finally to different types of listening.

The historical context for copyright, when the publishers were faced with performances on mechanical instruments such as barrel organs or music boxes and, eventually, player pianos, makes for some interesting openings to contemporary practice, with its widely varying degrees of artistic control of listening behavior. For an extreme but current example, the rock band AC/DC won't sell their recent album on iTunes because they don't want users to purchase (or probably even listen to) single songs outside of the album's context. Contrast this attitude with David Byrne and Brian Eno, who made all of the multitracks available for two songs from their landmark album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. It has become commonplace for recordings to contain instructions for listening, most typically that several copies should be played simultaneously (e.g., Boris's Dronevil or Zaireeka by the Flaming Lips — respectively two and four synchronized CDs to be played simultaneously; or Charles Curtis's Ultra White Violet Light and Bernhard Günter's two Monochrome albums — both with four tracks that may be freely combined).

But computer music management and freely available audio software have democratized listening behaviors. Listeners create and publish playlists and mixes, with varying degrees of Big Music approval. Respected reviewers like Vital Weekly's Frans de Waard admit to normalizing ultra-quiet albums like Francisco López's Untitled #150 in order to make them audible. Szendy writes about John Oswald's "manipulative listenings" that resulted in his banned Plunderphonics CD (although failing to note that lossless music files are available on Oswald's site, on a strictly not-for-sale basis of course). Every serious listener can compile examples from his or her own experience.

From the use of recordings as source material for new compositions, the next logical step is an arrangement of a piece of music for different instrumental forces. Szendy calls arrangers "listeners who have written down their listening" and uses Walter Benjamin's rather esoteric essay on translation as a prism to view Liszt's and Wagner's arrangements of Beethoven's symphonies, and Schumann's and Busoni's writings on arrangements. I won't try to summarize Benjamin's thesis — I'm not sure I can. Szendy's discussions of the nature of a musical work tie in with Lydia Goehr (whom he cites), but he puts a terminus on the value of arrangements with Schoenberg (who vehemently rejected Busoni's concert arrangement of one of his opus 11 piano pieces), without taking into consideration the plethora of arrangement types that we have today. He mentions Monk listening to Ellington, but surely jazz explores arrangement types and attitudes in detail (Coltrane and Richard Rodgers? Miles and Cyndi Lauper?). What is the relation between songs and their covers? And still within the western art music tradition, how about open works? How does a realization differ from an arrangement? Clearly composers like Feldman had an image in their mind when they composed open works, so the idea of the Work existing outside a given performance is as strong today as it was for Liszt and Beethoven.

But we might say, along with Adorno (with whom Szendy's book closes) that pop and jazz are entertainments, representatives of a fallen listening and a degraded notion of a musical work. An expert listener grasps all of the past, present and future moments into a "fully adequate mode of conduct [that] might be called 'structural hearing.'" Szendy traces the development of this attitude, from Mozart through Schoenberg (again), showing its history with the implicit contingencies, leaving listeners with the ability to select from different modes of listening based on the time and the work.

The concept of a musical work

An anonymous comment from my post on open forms a while back referenced Goehr for further thought about the specificity of scores and musical works. More recently, Greg Sandow got more specific, recommending Lydia Goehr's book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works in his series of posts about classical and pop reviews. Talking about musical works seems such an ingrained part of our vocabulary, but it is refreshing and a bit bracing to read a discussion of what the phrase really means. I've always thought about musical works in the same category as Justice Potter Stewart's famous phrase about pornography — I know it when I see it.  Naturally a precise definition is very slippery to grasp, and Goehr's  book is an excellent articulation of all of the subtleties and tensions inherent in the concept or definition of a musical work.

Since Goehr is primarily a philosopher (although she's also the daughter of British composer Alexander Goehr, so she has sufficient musical background for the topic), she discusses in some detail the definitional aspects of a musical work. Her central claim is that a musical work isn't an object that can have a fixed definition, but a concept with both original and derivative uses, all of which are continuously emerging. The work concept functions as an ideal, something that lives out there as a limit but is rarely if ever attained in practice.

The biggest virtue of Goehr's philosophical treatise is that it places the work concept into a historical setting, starting from a time when the concept was not in place and showing the reasons why composers and musicians began to use it. It really comes as no surprise to find that the work concept emerged around 1800 as part of the romantic movement, and was part of an effort on the part of musicians to gain more economic autonomy for themselves. Bach, and to some extent even Mozart and Haydn, were employees, producing functional music on demand (for example, Bach's cantatas were all written for specific Sunday services). There was little consideration that a work had any particular structural or artistic integrity as a whole, so Bach was able to reuse any and all of his material as the occasion demanded, as well as borrow anything that might be useful from other composers (which is why there are so many works of uncertain authorship, in addition to pieces on acknowledged themes from other composers).  Like so much else in the classical music world, Beethoven is the signpost for the changes, a convergence of theoretical and practical concerns around 1800 that set the eternal image of the creative genius who passes on his work, which will survive intact despite the vagaries of specific performances.

But, like so much else in the classical music world, at Beethoven we are stuck. Goehr spends some time discussing recent challenges to the work concept, both from inside and outside the classical music establishment. Cage and Stockhausen are mentioned, briefly, in their roles as theoreticians. But nobody has found a different way to talk about music, so we get the work concept when we discuss improv, pop, and world artists, despite vast differences in historical and cultural background. The romantic ideals have taken over the concert stage, so we get the incongruous spectacle of African drummers recreating indigenous dances for motionless listeners in a darkened auditorium. The issues of artistic autonomy and legitimacy that drove the romantic ideology in 1800 are still with us today. It was sobering to consider that musicians two centuries ago had to persuade the civil powers of their worth, even as music sought to free itself from the spectre of usefulness.

Open performers

Open forms is one of the most significant new developments in composition since World War II, where notable aspects of a score are left unspecified. The transition was subject to a lot of polemics in the early years, as different composers and schools tried to differentiate their work from the (usually less worthy) efforts of their contemporaries. An early example of an open form is Karlheinz Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI, composed in 1956, which had 19 fully composed fragments spread over a single large page, played in whatever order they caught the performer's eye. Purely graphic scores existed even earlier (such as Earle Brown's December 1952). Europeans liked the pattern of fragmentary composition (or maybe it was just piano composers), with works for piano like Henri Pousseur's Caractères, Pierre Boulez' Troisième Sonate pour piano, among others.

There are lots of ways to open up a composition, and figuring out how to group a bunch of fragments was only the beginning. I recently encountered a Thomas DeLio's book on the subject, Circumscribing the Open Universe. Compiled in 1984 and dealing exclusively with American composers, the book collects five essays from the early 1980s with an introduction, covering the following five compositions: Variations II by John Cage; Durations 3, #3 by Morton Feldman; For 1, 2, or 3 People by Christian Wolff; in memoriam... Esteban Gomez by Robert Ashley; and Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drum and Acoustic Pendulums by Alvin Lucier. DeLio's descriptions of the works are uniformly illuminating. He provides illustrations of the scores, including the composers' instructions for interpreting the unusual notations.   

Only the Feldman is printed on staff paper — the others are all graphic or text scores.  Feldman's piece is open because after the initial note, each player is free to go at their own speed.  Wolff dispenses with notes altogether and composed gestures and group interactions in a unique notation.  Ashley's piece, for any quartet, slowly evolves a reference sonority, varying pitch, intensity, timbre and density through careful listening.  Although there is a simple graphic with the piece, most of the information is in the accompanying text.  Lucier's piece exists both as a concert piece or as an installation and is an exploration of the properties of pure sound.  Again, although there are some diagrams with the piece to show how the pendulums interact with the drums, the score is basically text-based.  Cage's piece, which David Tudor recorded using contact microphones and the inside of the piano, is nothing more than some dots and lines on clear lucite, which the performer uses to create a score.  Of all the pieces discussed here, it's more of a recipe for making a score than a score itself.

The essays all illustrate some aesthetic principle from another field (such as literature or plastic arts), then show how it applies to the musical work in question. DeLio's choices of related artworks is highly personal and frankly, leaves me in a state of puzzlement. Confronted with a work in open form, we naturally seek a metaphorical explanation for our response because the work is unlike the standard classical works that often follow a traditional unidirectional flow. Boulez compared his third piano sonata to a walk through a city, where everyone will take a different path. Mobiles are also a common metaphor for works like Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI because of the comparison with Alexander Calder's mobile sculptures.

But DeLio illustrates Christian Wolff's piece with Bruce Nauman's Performance Corridor, emphasizing that both works "externalize the experience of art." I have not seen Nauman's work except on video, but even there I felt claustrophobic and paranoid, and the commentary at the site above places the work in the context of surveillance and Big Brother. Wolff's composition seeks new forms of musical communication that are diametrically opposed to Nauman's unidirectional monitor, which forces the viewer into a straight line with no possibility of seeing anything but blank walls and his or her own wanderings.

I registered similar concerns in his discussion of Feldman. Durations 3 on the page is composed of chords played simultaneously by the three instruments, but the performers are permitted to move at different tempos (this is what makes the work open), so listeners may not hear the chords as such. DeLio's metaphor for this piece is the very creation of the work of art, as if all of the sketches and drafts are on display as part of the piece. As an observation, this doesn't differ much from the gradual perception of form in many static pieces, which appear out of nowhere, often starting from silence or a single sonority. But his analysis shows how well the form is prepared, which seems contradictory to its creation ex nihilo. In addition, the continuities that DeLio describes assume that the performers all play more or less together, which they do on Michael Vogt's recording on ReR, but not on the Turfan Ensemble's recording on Mode. DeLio's analysis illuminates how Feldman may have composed the piece, but in performance the traits that he highlights may become blurred.

Some of my confusion about DeLio's analyses stems from his adoption of the composer's perspective.  Typically, an analysis approaches a piece from the perspective of an ideal listener, bringing about audible details of a piece and showing how they fit into the big picture.  A listener can grasp the form in most nineteenth century classical works relatively easily, and many work conform to a standard form (such as a theme and variations, sonata form, rondo, etc.). But in most cases, the open form work does not present itself to the listener as such — it's only on multiple listenings of different versions that the open nature becomes apparent. Stockhausen actually specifies in the instructions to Klavierstück XI that "this piano piece should if possible be performed twice or more in the course of a programme," and many pianists have obliged by including multiple versions on a single CD. For works on a larger scale, or works whose openness is deeper than simply what catches the eye, multiple performances may be neither possible nor desirable.

The real audience of an open work is the performer, who must make decisions that performers ordinarily don't need to make. Wolff's piece is all about performer coordination and interaction, even allowing for certain actions to be taken in response to unintentional sounds (i.e., mistakes), which the more standard classical technique doesn't acknowledge. Similarly, Ashley's piece requires four performers (instrumentation unspecified) to listen closely to each other and modify their playing according to the rules defined in the piece. The source materials in Cage's Variations II are so rudimentary that a considerable amount of planning and forethought must precede any performance. DeLio's analyses target the process of composition and illuminate the work of the composer, but the nature of an open work is to target the performer. Typically an invisible conduit between the genius of the composer and the willing audience receptacles, the performers in open works must change their ways of preparing, listening, and even playing their instruments.

Stockhausen recognized this essential nature of open form in works like Spiral for a soloist, instrument unspecified. In Spiral, the performer finds events on a short wave radio and responds to them in various prescribed manners, culminating in the direction to "transcend beyond the limits of the playing/singing technique that you have used up to this point and then also beyond the limitations of your instrument/voice.… From this point retain what you have experienced in the extension of your limits, and use it in this and all future performances of Spiral."

Indeterminate Tudor

For the composers in both the New York and Darmstadt schools in the 1950s and 1960s, David Tudor was the interpreter for all new music written for the piano, and we undoubtedly owe Tudor credit for the large amount of piano music from the hands of Cage, Feldman, Boulez, Stockhausen, and their contemporaries. In later years, Tudor turned his attention more to electronics, but he remained committed to Cage's music throughout his life. His last piano recording, made in 1992, was a recording of Cage's Concert for Piano, a work he had recorded several times previously, starting almost immediately after the work was written in 1958.

Because of Tudor's stature in Cage interpretation, I looked forward with some anticipation to a recent two-CD set on Editions RZ of Tudor piano recordings from the 1950s and 1960s culled from the archives of WDR and other radio archives. The Swiss label, Hat Hut, has released a number of David Tudor CDs from the same radio archive, but many of them are now out of print. The new Editions RZ set includes five recordings from Cage's Music for Piano series; three recordings of Christian Wolff's Duo for Pianists I; one recording each of Cage's Winter Music, a realization of a graphic score of Sylvano Bussotti, and Morton Feldman's Piece for Four Pianos; and a reissue of Tudor's recording of Variations II on amplified piano, originally released on the landmark Columbia Masterworks recording of New Electronic Music. All of the individual works recorded here require some degree of realization (in some cases, a high degree) because of the open nature of the scores.

Cage's Music for Piano series consists of 84 unnumbered sheets of music, published in eight different sets (1, 2, 3, 4-19, 20, 21-52, 53-68, and 69-84). Cage generated all the notes from imperfections in the manuscript paper in conjunction with I Ching operations, and the works were to some extent exercises in composing more quickly after the long composition time for Music of Changes, his first major piano work composed with chance operations. Cage eventually found that one of the drawbacks of these pieces was that the music paper imperfections produced only single notes. Here is an example, one system (of four) from one of the sheets. Even though he specified that some notes were to be muted or played pizzicato, single notes still makes for a very sparse texture. To circumvent this problem, Cage allowed for different pieces to be performed simultaneously, by one or multiple pianists. Presumably Tudor's realizations on this set are illustrations of the combinatorial possibilities, but they're all still very pointillistic. Winter Music applies similar techniques, but combines the points into chords, and includes some additional rules about how to disambiguate mapping notes in the chords to different clefs. Compared to the Music for Piano pieces, Winter Music (played here by two pianists, Tudor and Cage) sounds positively lush.

As a bizarre footnote, one of the Music for Piano pieces was previously released on one of the Hat releases with a different title (Music for Piano 21, 22, 26, 29, 34, 36 here is the same recording as Music for Piano 52-56 on the Hat album). It makes me wonder: if the compilers can't decide which pieces are actually being played, what's the difference between these pieces and random notes?

Cage and Tudor must have had a relatively fixed program when they made the rounds of German radio stations in 1960. One of the Hat releases contained two versions of Christian Wolff's Duo for Pianists I, recorded in 1960 for WDR. This album contains two different recordings of the same two realizations, also recorded in 1960 but for Radio Bremen. (Jazz buffs get upset when archival releases don't contain complete discographical information. One might have the same complaint here.) Wolff's piece uses time brackets and fixed pitch classes from which to choose, but leaves many details up to the performer. In this example from For Pianist that uses similar notation, Wolff specifies one sound from pitch class C for 1 and 1/5 seconds, followed by no sounds for 3/5 seconds, followed by three sounds from pitch class C, one of which is played pizzicato, and one of which is lowered by a semi-tone. The whole system should take 2 and 1/10 seconds. Wolff wrote Duo for Pianists I for his own concerts with Frederic Rzewski as an experiment in controlled improvisation. Tudor created fairly strict realizations of the various indeterminate pieces that he played (despite occasional heated objections from the composer), but it's interesting to hear the proof with the comparison of these two recordings. This release also includes a third recording of the same piece, done three years later. By 1963, Tudor was feeling constrained by notated pieces. As he states in an interview fragment included at the end of the second disc, he only felt alive "in every part of my consciousness" when he was called upon to make actions that were "undetermined as to what [sounds] they are going to produce," so it is likely that the later recording was performed more in the spirit of the original composition.

One of the reasons I was excited about this release was that I recently started making a realization of Winter Music. Without going into too many details of the mechanics, I endeavored to understand Cage's egoless musical activity through study of one of his most famous indeterminate pieces. But I find the nearly random nature of the piece almost too daunting. I have a few minutes of music prepared, which I currently play very softly, as if it were a Feldman piece (Tudor peppers his realizations with occasional very loud percussive attacks). But so far I remain unconvinced. I am more comfortable performing music that has patterns that develop or repeat. Cage's indeterminate music deliberately eschews any kind of pattern, so the performer must supply a musical thread that simply doesn't exist in the printed score. It presents a different set of challenges than more fully notated music, a half-way house between composition and interpretation. Cage's systems may have made it quicker for him to compose, but the resulting works put an unusual burden on the performer.

But the creation of a realization of Winter Music isn't really an egoless activity. One of Cage's primary goals once he started composing with chance operations was to make compositional decisions without his ego getting in the way. But compositional decisions are different from performance decisions. When it comes to a performance of these pieces, once the performer has made the requisite decisions to transform the score into an audible piece of music, the performance characteristics aren't that different than for any other fully notated work. Wolff's pieces at least provide a framework for a performer to create a different work at each performance (even if Cage and Tudor opted to fix the performance characteristics for their 1960 radio tour). In this respect, Duo for Pianists I is more like the piano compositions of Henri Pousseur. As Tudor realized in the 1963 interview, the indeterminate nature of the piece should translate to its performance as well, and not simply to the ability to prepare any number of static realizations.

David Tudor's Music for Piano on Editions RZ is available at Erstwhile Records and other fine record stores.

Pousseur's World

For a long time, I've had a soft spot for Belgian composer Henri Pousseur. One of the Darmstadt generation along with Boulez, Berio and Stockhausen, he was introduced to American audiences on the landmark new music album from 1967, New Electronic Music, which also included Variations II by John Cage and Milton Babbitt's Ensembles for Synthesizer. Pousseur's work, Trois Visages de Liège (1961), was very seductive. The opening movement (Air and Water) is a slow movement built up from sweeping electronics (I was attracted to drones even then), but what elevated the piece above its contemporaries was the second movement (Voice of the City), composed primarily of the voices of children at play. The voices continue into the third movement (Forges), sometimes recurring without alteration, but the work's climax is a single spoken word, "Solidarité".

Later on, I acquired a Wergo release containing Pousseur's Jeu de Miroirs de Votre Faust, a work for piano and voices on tape that has only recently been issued on CD for the first time. A couple of factors converged here that drew my attention. Votre Faust was an opera, with the libretto by Michel Butor and music by Pousseur. The opera had aleatoric aspects, required audience involvement to choose how the story progressed, and as far as I know has never been successfully staged. At the time, Butor was one of a loosely associated group of writers of the so-called nouveau roman, or new novel. As a college student majoring in French in the early 1970s, the new novel was definitely the Big Thing, and I avidly read all the new novels I could find. By the 1970s, Butor had long since quit writing novels, moving more into poetry and essays, and the opportunity to hear his work on an opera was interesting. In the meantime, I had also started collecting new music piano scores, including a number of Pousseur's. The piano part of Jeu de Miroirs was a solo piano piece (with an optional soprano part) which had an interesting twist on the aleatory piano pieces that Stockhausen and Boulez had published. The score was printed in three systems, and each system included three groups, separated by double bars.

But instead of music, some systems merely had windows, which you cut out with a razor blade, and the windows permitted a view of the music behind.

The pages were all loose-leaf, which meant they were all interchangeable, and there was no predefined order. This meant that the contents of the window could change, depending on which pages and what page order the pianist used for a performance.

Since the pianist could nest windows within windows, it also meant that the pianist could turn the page and see some of the same musical groups recur, but they might have different dynamics or phrasing (this information was placed above the groups, and therefore could be overridden by the window). It was more like a game than a musical piece.

Aleatoric music on this scale is a fascinating experiment from a turbulent time, not often duplicated by composers today. I later spent nearly a year studying caractères 1a, another of Pousseur's aleatoric piano pieces. It was an unusual exercise in finding musical order from a collection of fragments, similar to Jeu de Miroirs but with a less complex sequencing mechanism. I'm surprised that nobody has recorded his complete piano works, which span his entire career, are composed in many different styles, and would be an interesting collection.

All of this background is to explain my eagerness to hear anything that Pousseur releases, and even more so when Butor's name is attached. Pousseur and Butor have the twin bill on a recent Alga Marghen release, Paysages Planétaires, a boxed set with three CDs and a sixty-four page booklet. The musical work was composed for an installation, and consists of sixteen "ethno-electroacoustic" pieces combining different musical traditions from around the world. The music reminds me a lot of another famous electronic portrait of world music, Stockhausen's Hymnen, both because of the collage effect of the different kinds of music and because both Pousseur and Stockhausen use an electronic white noise as a backdrop to the world music foreground. In Stockhausen's case, the white noise was typically shortwaves, and although I hear some shortwaves in Pousseur, I hear more straightforward field recordings as well. In addition, Pousseur uses more vocal music than Stockhausen did, and of course Pousseur's work is not primarily intended for the concert hall (and thus, not intended to be absorbed in a single sitting). Butor contributed a set of texts, one for each of the pieces, which may be read aloud when the pieces are performed in a concert setting or perused at home. It's worth noting that most of the booklet is bilingual, English and French, but Butor's poems are not translated.

Paysages Planétaires is classic musique concrète created in a contemporary digital studio. Although nothing in the booklet says so, I believe that field recordings, whose origins are easily discernable, comprise the vast majority of the musical materials. One of the chapters in the booklet describes the samples used for each piece. Pousseur wants the sounds to remain recognizable so that the listener can imagine himself and herself taking a sonic tour of the world. He includes three long epigraphs from three generations of French poets: Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Claudel, and Butor, whose themes are the simultaneity of events from all parts of the globe. Pousseur has made an audio portrait of the globe, of "all hours at once,… all seasons together" (Claudel) for our turbulent times that are so interested in pushing everyone apart.

The deluxe package is available from Forced Exposure and other fine retail outlets.