Temporal Structures Vs. Signs, Traces, Emanations

Two notions of music perpetually engage me, each one by its seeming necessity, and the pair by their stubborn incompatibility with one another. On the one hand I accept that music is fundamentally about time, timelines, and durational structures. According to this inclusive view (henceforth the 'temporal structures' view), music is essentially sound in time, perceived. Whether sounds occur according to an author's plan, or without an intentional agent, or through the design of an intentional agent to allow unintentional sounds to come to be, as long as an observer listens (whereby the passage of time is also a given), music is thereby extant. No further circumstances are required, though the majority of music may involve much more specific contexts. The second notion of music, which battles with the first for my loyalty, is more complex. On this view music is a highly associative, intrinsically political, art of meaningful sounds. Music is a form of communication, whether as a language, or as a modality for relating to the past, or as a vehicle for values. The two views complement one another, to be sure, but they do not synthesize. It is an exhausting dance to go back and forth between the two views as a composer, and one is always at risk of falling out of step. I hope that by interrogating each view I may clarify some of my compositional priorities. The temporal structures view is richer than it may at first seem. With Cage I accept the primacy of duration over all other characteristics of sound, because it uniquely has being in silence as well as in sound. I also follow Cage's switch in terminology from 'rhythm' to 'duration'. Whereas 'rhythm' connotes periodicity, patterns, and historical approaches to musical time, 'duration' is relatively unburdened by such associations. I am interested in embracing the latter term in order to de-emphasize, if not entirely to discount, past eras' assumptions about musical time. By dropping historically contingent categories from our definition of music and allowing music to refer more broadly, we can position music as fundamental to being, a given in any world with time and consciousness. However, this may be as much a deficiency as it is an appeal. Categories such as rhythm may continue to function whether we accept them or not; it is not possible to dispose of collective memory out of hand. All the same, we can resist it. In a different way, emphasizing temporal structures frees us to embrace the contingencies of the present moment. Any sound, as well as any 'silence' (silence is an ideal, it does not strictly speaking exist), can be heard as music, regardless of whether it was created by a traditional musical instrument or by other means. Today street sounds, domestic and industrial noises, animal voices, and extended vocal and instrumental techniques, hardly need to be argued for as Russolo, Schaeffer, Henry, Cage, and Varèse did long ago. In my view, an inclusive attitude coupled with an emphasis on duration go hand in hand with seeing music as an art of dividing timelines by distinct sound events. Thinking in these terms, I see clarity of musical thought as equivalent to clarity of temporal division. However, it is also important to acknowledge the dynamic nature of sound, which complicates the division of a timeline. Sound only exists in time. It might be an interesting exercise to imagine music as a gamut of sound objects in self-contained moments, or as a succession of such moments, but the interest of such an exercise would lie in its tension with the transitory reality of sound. I am inclined to compose with temporal structures that address this fundamental reality. The kind of structure that interests me will deal with rates of change and how they change, rather than with plain durations, spectra, and so forth. However, it must be acknowledged that even if we identify essential structures of music, they cannot be prescri ptive for composition. We do not necessarily have to structure our creative acts on central, rather than peripheral, elements. Centuries of Western art music is structured on parameters such as pitch and timbre rather than duration. It is not in the inclusive spirit of my temporal structures view to call such music 'incorrect'. However, I cannot operate fully within the temporal structures view, because of its disregard for collective memory. Sound cannot be treated as a mere object for a neutral consciousness to perceive; the listener's prejudices are a priori present in the sound object. The temporal structures view avoids the complex issue of how sounds are perceived, well aware that the issue is difficult to discuss. But it does so at a cost to its persuasiveness: when it comes to creating music one is inevitably faced with the messy histories of sounds. A sound's acoustic properties alone cannot suggest necessary trajectories for its continuation in an extended piece of music. Nor can such trajectories be independent of the ways in which sounds in past music have developed. Eero Tamasti points to a wide field of musical signification, to which experience of music is inevitably bound:

The more philosophically-minded are not satisfied with the communication model [.], but rather see music as an emanation of values, epistemes, power relations (Foucault 1973, 1975), of gender (Kristeva and feminists in the American "new musicology"), of ideologies (Barthes 1957; Frith 1978, 1984, 1988, 1996), as human-animal exchanges (Sebeok 1990; Mache 1983; Martinelli 2002), or as more abstract axiological entities. Values have no influence, however, unless they are embodied in our everyday lives and social interactions. [.] No object or thing has any existence for us unless it means or signifies something. Music thus mediates between values be they aesthetic, ideological, or whatever - and fixed, ready-made objects. In fact, music as a sign provides an ideal case of something meaningful and communicative, and thus of something semiotical par excellence. (Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics, p. 4)

Tamasti reminds us of the complexity and variety of music's functions, and adds that insofar as it concerns values it also concerns meaning. Even so, the word 'communication' too strongly connotes purposeful and successful exchanges of signs, so I will call my view that emphasizes meaning, history, and values, the 'semiological' view. On this view, music is a body of relational and transitory statements. No degree of numerical clarity can guarantee its significance under all circumstances. The same sounds have different meanings to different people and in different situations and points in time. Even works great at one time can become meaningless in another time. Whereas the temporal structures view takes pride in focusing on the mathematical rigidity of duration, the semiological view argues that every music is without a fixed essence, for its meanings are contingent upon unstable associations with particular styles, social classes, nations, material conditions, ideologies, types of humans, individual memories, and so on. The temporal structures view has faith in the possibility for 'material' to generate 'form', because it identifies both of them with temporal structure. The semiological view objects that there cannot be a 'right' way for any given sonic material to develop, because from different perspectives the material will appear to have different tendencies. There are, of course, other views of music; I do not mean to suggest these are the only two, nor that all conceptions of music are reducible to this opposition. However, I find these two notions particularly compelling, and in their disagreement, particularly fruitful. Finally, neither view is conclusive on an ethical question that faces every practicing musician: what music should I make? For whatever they identify as essential in music would be only a descri ption; as Hume pointed out, we cannot infer an 'ought' from an 'is'. Yet each one directs the mind to different questions, and these questions compete for the creative musician's attention. Each concept inspires a host of criteria for judging music, and these criteria are frequently incompatible with one another. One could, of course, try to theorize the duality away. But once one enters into the practice of creating music the problem reappears. Analytical rigor vanishes in conscientious compositional praxis, and a labyrinth of numbers, values, and meanings takes over. As composer I am hoping to contribute not a theory of composition but several pieces of music that present themselves as challenges to analysis, i.e. urge analysis to rethink its categories. I have tried to keep the dual views of music in mind while composing, but I have not strictly speaking attempted a synthesis. These compositions are not conceived as answers to the problem so much as blind attempts towards a better way to ask the question. In view of all this it seems appropriate to me to acknowledge some problems with the notion of composer as researcher. In what sense is the work a composer does, or should do, research? We are likely to believe 'research' implies participation in some sort of intellectual progress, the researcher an occupational thinker, reader, or technician making contributions to a field of knowledge. However, even this cautious definition is dubious with respect to music composition, which is not conventionally conceived as aiming at knowledge. It is not my goal here to defend the knowledge character of music, though I am sympathetic to some such attempts. Instead I would like to go in the opposite direction and name some features of 'research' towards which my compositional work is deliberately ambivalent: mastery, conceptual control, rationality, positivism, technological control, and clarity. David Foster Wallace claimed: 'fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being' (McCaffery 1993). Grandly stated though this is, the point is that a serious art must be able, not just to reflect but deeply to engage with, fragility, vulnerability, stupidity, confusion, and failure. The compositional processes through my doctoral work involved a tension between my rational, theorizing mode, which had the specific aim of following my research proposal (to address and balance the duality described above), and my attentiveness to musical possibilities, no matter their strength.