Rituals of Contingency. Essay on Badiou, Wagner, Cage.

Theory & Event has published my essay "Rituals of Contingency" in its most recent issue. The text can also be found on academia.edu, by following this link. The abstract:

Badiou’s politics stresses the need for new fictions dissociated from the Great Names of history. By contrast, his views on art remain largely historical, focusing on names, schools and oeuvres, rather than on the artistic process itself. His views on Wagner, and his ideal of a non-transcendent ritual, are contrasted with the more process-oriented, open, immanent rituals of John Cage. Intersecting the poetics of the communist philosopher with those of the anarchist composer opens the possibility of a new interpretation of the immanent ritual and new values of freedom through the notion of a contingent form of discipline.

Mixed Economy, Ensemble Klang

(from the score:) "Six individuals negotiate a mixed economy, which consists of four different ways of organizing the collective into subgroups. These four planes are intertwined, so the performers must constantly shift their relationship to one another and to the whole, and out of the four planes' motivic shreds create their song."

Mixed Economy, written in 2010, is probably the most complex score I have written. The idea was to base everything on the way the sextet can be seen as a rich multiplicity of sub-ensembles: six solos, one sextet, fifteen duos (one for each couple of instruments), two trios (the winds and the 'rhythm section', mostly playing chords, however). However, instead of presenting these formations in sequential order, they all happen at the same time. In the densest sections of the piece, everybody is constantly related to everybody else in shifting ways. This puts a lot of pressure on individual parts as well as on the sense of ensemble playing - while creating a polyphony of very high density.

The ideal of a completely saturated polyphony has been a constant in my composing, but not merely from a fascination with high information density. I'd like to create forms that do not only create complex textures, but also make their complexity somehow transparent. You can't be expected to hear and follow everything, but you should be able to zoom in and zoom out on the processes as they unfold while you listen. To achieve this type of complexity, I have ended up rather simplifying the basic motives of my melodic style, while making heavy use of canon-like relations and repetitions, but always in intricate mosaic patterns and flexible rhythmic relationships.

Within this big, messy flux, sub-ensembles organize themselves: tiny duos that should be completely together, trio or sextet entrances that are coordinated. Like so many attempts at community in a world where all stability is under constant threat of drifting apart. The soft, slow "solos" offer a form of repose.

The piece is in seven sections, each featuring different mixtures of the "planes". The fifth section is the longest, most continuous onslaught of total counterpoint.

Mixed Economy was written (with support from Fonds Podiumkunsten) in 2010 for Ensemble Klang, and premiered by them in March 2014 at De Link in Tilburg. This recording is of the first performance.



also from the score:

Mixed Economy (Worlds on Four Planes) is part of a series of works which share similar musical concerns. Other works in this series include 20 Worlds (2005) for 2 pianos and Worlds and Harmony (2006-2008) for 12 instruments, Sept Germes Cristallins (2008) for voice and three instruments, Crawling (2010) for any ensemble.


These are some of the musical assumptions that these works mostly share:


Melody is thought primarily as changing vectors of pure speed and direction that are woven together in varying patterns, rather than as rhetorical, expressive gestures;

Rhythm and meter are directly related to melodic contour;

Techniques of indeterminate coordination between parts leading to unpredictable polyrhythmical ("metametrical") structures, like moiré patterns;

Decentered formal structures based on interdependence of the performers instead of centrally organized (conducted, determinate) structures, every performer being an equally important chain link with equal responsibility and influence on the total musical form, and requiring every performer to continually play and listen to the other performers at the same time;

Dense, saturated types of counterpoint based on elaborate forms of heterophony, or variable canonic textures, organised in extensive blocks of almost static large-scale surface development, but of permanent internal variation;

An interest in diagonal listening, in which listeners are encouraged to shift their attention freely from part to part, or between individual details, contrapuntal relationships and full textures;

As in certain kinds of minimal music, repetition of motivic cells is used to facilitate textural transparency and flexibility of performer contribution, though the aural effect tends much more towards complexity and permanent change;

Mixed Economy in particular explores the possibilities of mixing multiple types of material and ever changing phrase structures within individual parts.

These technical assumptions seek, in a focused way, to bring about a ecstatic sense of multitudinous collectivies and of a multiplicity of possible points of view, a liberatory musical experience on the verge of the uncontrollable.



Other works that feature related ideas include Eindig Stuk (2004) for string quartet and electric guitar, Panoramic Variations (2004) for 6 instruments, 2 Suites (2004) for violin and piano, The Weather Riots (2002) for 2 or more high instruments, Toccata III (2001) for 2 Glockenspiels.

'Action Time', essay for The Ear Reader

My essay, Action Time, is now up on the weblog of The Ear Reader. It looks at works by various composers (including Cage, Wolff, Beuger, Werder and myself) trying to discover what an 'inside-out' view of time could look like. One where time is a function of actions rather than the other way round. And it looks at how ideas about time affect the art of composition. At the heart of it, the piece discusses the Number Pieces, b

The piece is pretty long; at the top of the article, you can find a link to a printable .pdf-version.

'In this history there are three related tendencies, although they occur in changing configurations within specific works. The first tendency is to see composition as definition of potential actions and action grammars. The second is the dissolution of compositional signature and idiom. The third is the emergence of interaction and the being-together of musicians as such as a compositional parameter. The tendencies signal a shift in how musical material is understood, a move away from material as that what is heard, to material as the internal dynamics of events, in excess of their audible manifestation and identity. Likewise, form shifts away from being concerned with sound architecture (“organized sound”) to being an operation on time types. In particular, action grammars delineate temporal fields that have a dimensionality different from that governing the ‘real time’ of performance. Yet their ‘other time’ is a virtual accompaniment to performance time, forming an indiscernible part of it, and the relationship between these different time forms becomes the subject matter of composition.'

The Othertimely - On history and Jürg Frey

The following text was written for a collection of texts in celebration of Jürg Frey's 60th birthday: Jürg Frey, Werkbetreachtungen – Reflexionen – Gespräche, edited by Eva-Maria Houben, published by Edition Howeg in Zürich. The book also includes texts and interviews by Frey himself, by Eva-Maria Houben, Dante Boon, Jack Callahan and others.


When is Jürg Frey's music? Not from when, but at what moment in time does it work? Does it belong to now, whatever the moment 'now' may be, or does it speak from some other time, gone or to come, or is perhaps timeless? These are fundamental questions that can be asked of any music. Like no other art form, music seems to exist 'now', but at the same time it always relates this 'now' to something outside, some virtual other time that gives 'now' its shape in the music, a time of hazy memories or vague expectations. Let’s, for the moment, call this virtual time from which music speaks the othertimely dimension of music. In my experience of the work of Jürg Frey, this dimension of relating now to the othertimely has become particularly uncanny.

Some background, to begin with, on how I encountered this dimension first, which goes back to music education. During the years of my formal training at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, a very large thing called 'music history' was always present. It was the thing that somehow would always condition the now that we were creating in our own works, and in the teachings of The Hague School, consciousness of your relation to this music history was always stressed. Moreover, in that environment, it was clear that there existed a major opposition in how one could deal with ‘music history’, exemplified by Schönberg on the one hand and Stravinsky on the other. The difference could be said to be this: Schönberg was seen as a believer working inside music history and giving it shape and direction, whereas Stravinsky worked with the ironic wisdom of one who can't afford to fully believe any more, and was circling around music history from the outside.

While both were revered, the aesthetic environment of the conservatory made it clear that the more advanced compositional sensibility should include a Stravinskian moment of distance. We were taught to see music history as a repository of models, of styles, forms and techniques, and one defined one's own artistic persona by relating to these models, but always through a distancing function, usually called 'commentary' or ‘irony’. As a composer, the ideal was to become an individual by the way you commented on a model, which was a thing that was available to you through the big medium of music history. You could call this position “post-historical”. The distance was necessary not only to form your own position, but also to guard yourself against getting trapped too much in the believer's position, that of the belief that one could live the actual Truth of music history.

Such a belief was of course Schönbergian. Indeed Schönberg is a historical composer if ever there was one. Maybe he even was the last one, of perhaps very few such composers at all. It remains striking to read a work like the Theory of Harmony, a book that I've often thought of as a “novel about tonality”, meticulously reworking the past at the very moment that the composer's own works were consciously exploring the future. In the book centuries of tonal experience are critiqued, turned upside down, explored, speculated about, even as in the book, Schönberg explicitly refers to his own practice as “ultra-modernist”. Thus the Schönbergian ‘now’ was a point from which one had to look back and forward at the same time to locate oneself at a pivotal moment in music history, and so be fully part of its project. The problem of course is that the project called ‘music history’ is not a general thing. Music history is a construction for understanding music, and its form in classical music was conceived to help the Western bourgeois class explain its own rise to prominence. Hence, music history is a project that only really gets going with, say, Mozart's attempt to work independently (Father Bach’s work still being ‘early music’), and ends with the very gradual decline of the bourgeois project of Bildung and political participation, with the role of the citizen gradually being replaced by that of the consumer. This more or less defines two centuries of work that even today is recognized by us, late-bourgeois consumers, as “classical music”, with Schönberg working at just about the end of it.

Neither model was satisfactory for me as a young composer, though I wasn't quite able to articulate why. I learnt the tricks and tactics of commentary without learning to trust them; I also learnt the forms and techniques of music history without learning to live them as Truth. I think these are conditions that very many artists have been working under for decades, and by now, the majority of working composers have matured in these conditions.

The great influence of John Cage on composers working now may in part be explained by this. His work can make you feel that there are ways around the whole problem of “music history”, as if he found a way to sidestep the conundrum. Morton Feldman in fact used that idea in his polemics against the European avant-garde composers, claiming that Boulez and Stockhausen were still too much within history. By contrast, in Feldman’s beautiful mythology, the New York School could come out of just six weeks in 1951 during which nobody knew what was happening. That’s without doubt an exaggeration, but it does feel like the othertimely dimension of Cage’s work can’t be reduced to “music history” as we know it. Instead, Cage’s work speaks from a different place, closer to the texture of time itself as it is moulded and shaped in his temporal structures, using chance techniques that can be applied to whatever material it encounters, whether historical or not. Sometimes, Cage’s work uses some kind of “music history” (say, in Hymns and Variations, the Europeras or Cheap Imitation); sometimes, it hardly seems to do so (say, in the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra or in Music For...). Cage’s othertimely position is like a diagonal cutting through history; indeed, as Marjorie Perloff has argued, his tradition is a piecemeal personal construction: the “tradition” of Schoenberg, Satie, Joyce, Thoreau, Fuller and Suzuki. Bien étonnés indeed!

One of the things then that one might get from Cage is the sense that art need not speak from, or about, music history in order to have interesting or important things to say. Or perhaps even that it’s possible to redesign the othertimely place from which the music speaks. A looser relation to music history helps open artistic awareness to other possibilities, to help us realize that there is in fact an irreducible plurality not just of musical styles, but of temporalities themselves. Many can be discovered. Music can speak from the other time of social organization and class struggle (Wolff, Cardew), from awareness to sound itself (Oliveros’ Deep Listening) or its physical structure (Lucier), from the timeless realms of mathematics (Johnson, Tenney) or even from outside of time (as Ashley called his collected writings).

This, then was my situation when I first heard Jürg Frey’s music: I had become familiar with the idea that music could speak from within music history (as did Schönberg), or from a deliberate distance to music history (the Stravinskianism that was taught in The Hague), or from places that are somehow entirely tangential to it, even outside of time. But in Frey, I heard again a voice speaking from history - but not as I knew it. Here, history was neither an intensely lived actuality, nor a distant repository of objects and materials. History itself seemed to be a place outside of time.

This is probably not a situation unique to Jürg Frey’s work, but thinking of what I heard in some of his pieces made me more aware of this possibility than anything else. Perhaps you can hear a composer like Satie in a similar way - Satie, a composer who was dreaming of the middle ages as he lived the life of the bars of exciting metropolitan Paris. His early works sound like a dreamed reconstruction of some very old music, as if he was trying to dream Gregorian chant and the middle ages back into our time (even up to inventing entire holy knighthood orders for his personal church). Likewise, Xenakis, in key moments in his work, dreamed of a music that would speak from ancient Greece. But with Jürg Frey, the dream is harder to grasp. It’s not even clear if it’s a dream at all.

The clearest example I can think of is the use of triads in pieces like Sam Lazaro Bros and the 2nd String Quartet. In neither of these pieces do the triads “refer” to historical material, as a triad would do in a piece out of the post-historical commentary line. But neither are the triads ahistorical things, pure objects, as they might have been in a James Tenney piece. What happens instead is a consistent evocation of history, though I’m never quite sure what history is being evoked exactly. The piano piece has something Satie-like, but at times one feels a turn could almost be from the 16th century. Or is it Schubert, or rather the place from which Schubert’s work speaks as well, that we are hearing? Then again, our piano is a modern instrument, and the piece might also just be modern music. Between all these possibilities, Sam Lazaro Bros. (with its bluntly noncommittal title) never quite settles into a specific one. It seems to skirt the boundaries between historical identities as it ambles along in its own time, just as its own phrase never settles, never quite cadences, drawing us along with it, constantly passing many othertimely times that virtually dance around it in the background.

In the quartet similar effects happen through different means. Here, we’re not drawn along by an ambling line; instead, the sounds are separate, but each new sound again sucks us into an inner world that itself sounds like a vast superposition of other-times. This time, it’s not the turns of phrase that suggest these, but there are many voices submerged into the sound itself. The insistent atmosphere might remind you of Schubert, the sonic complexity, of Scelsi; but if you listen deeply, you can sometimes hear what sounds like entire orchestras and choirs in the sound, playing symphonies that sound from an unknown place. Each chord itself could belong to many eras at once. Again, it is as if they are all virtually present, shaping our now without disclosing their own location.

These pieces speak from an uncharted virtual world that is hidden within music history. The music does actively seek out that world and so it does engage history, but without fixing it. Instead, it encounters material that is historically loaded, but the material is immediately being returned to virtuality. I hear a minor triad, but I don’t know from what place it came, like a piece of driftwood washing ashore which clearly must have had a history. I’m in fact not sure if I know the triad or not. Perhaps it needs to be heard again. And so we realize we should listen once more to the things that seemed known, perhaps to discover that they are, in fact, starting points for things we did not know we knew.

Now on Youtube: Disaster Songs, poems by Rob Halpern, music by Samuel Vriezen, performed by the David Kweksilber Big Band and the amazing Claron McFadden earlier this year. I'm very happy to have it as a video, because the ensemble playing was meant to be seen as well as heard, particularly in the third song.

A hidden non-hierarchical structure. Block Designs and The Weather Riots

Below, an exchange with musicologist Gilbert Delor, on my composition The Weather Riots and on Block Designs.

The Weather Riots, for variable instrumentation, is one of my most performed pieces. Written in 2002, it constitutes my first compositional response to John Cage's idea of structuring pieces with 'flexible time brackets', which he did in his late series of compositions, the so-called Number Pieces. Links to performances of the piece are given at the end of the post.

Block Designs are structures from the mathematical field of combinatorics. I used one such structure to determine the harmonies in The Weather Riots. Upon learning of this technique, composer Tom Johnson, who is a good friend of mine, explored the subject much more deeply, which led to a whole series of wonderful pieces.




Hi Samuel

I have a question for you: when it comes to combinatorial design, Tom often refers to a piece of yours he heard "around 2003", which was based on a series of 11 five-note chords, each one having two notes in common with all the others. Can you tell me which piece it was, and, with some precision, when this took place? Thanks for your help.

Gilbert




Dear Gilbert,

Block designs appeared in my music briefly in 2002, as basic harmonic structures that were used to develop elaborate contrapuntal possibilities. First this happened in Seasons (2001-2002) which used systems of 9 chords of 4 notes each. The (11, 5, 2) system appeared in The Weather Riots (2002) and Krise (2002); Tom heard The Weather Riots in performance in 2003. The Weather Riots remains among my works the strongest composition to use block designs; the piece has been played more than any other piece of mine so far.

Samuel




Dear Samuel,

Shall I conclude from what you say that you were already aware of block design theory in 2001? Tom says in his writings that you're the one who led him toward this field of mathematics, but that you probably didn't know about it yourself by this time. As if you had settled your collection of chords for The Weather Riots only through empiric approach. Is he wrong?

G.




Dear Gilbert,

No, that was more or less the case. I do have some background in mathematics, but I never studied the field of combinatorics deeply so I didn't know about block designs. I was simply looking for a harmonic system which would have certain symmetrical properties, and I found a few block designs. These I used in my pieces. Then I showed my structures to some music theorists & mathematicians online, and people told me that these were in fact "block designs".

Shortly after that, I told Tom about the structures when he happened to be in Amsterdam, at a concert I organized, on which the ensemble HPS Band performed their version of The Weather Riots (this was in fact on march 11, 2004). In our correspondence, I find the first mention of Tom's investigating "Steiner triple systems" a few weeks later, on April 1, 2004.

I never used block designs seriously in my later works after that; Tom more or less "took over" with the technique, and applied them differently than I did.  For me, block designs were a solution to a compositional problem about harmony. For Tom, the block designs were given, and the compositional problem was how to translate them into music! As a consequence, I think Tom's approach to block designs is much purer than what I did.

The real subject matter of The Weather Riots is not block design harmony as such, but how to integrate the time structure of the Cage number pieces (with flexible time brackets) with what you could call a neo-baroque kind of contrapuntal language.

My problem was this: all the motives in The Weather Riots (each with its own contour & metrical feel) have a similar harmonic structure, being all based on five notes. The time structure in The Weather Riots was supposed not to be about hierarchical relations between the harmonies. That being given, how could I find harmonic families that would relate chords to one another in a minimally hierarchical way - i.e. no two chords were supposed to have a "stronger" relation than any other pair, so that any progression would have the same structural meaning - while also allowing for a maximum of variation of harmonic quality - so that the harmonic feel of the piece would have something "chancy" about it?

Block designs were the solution to the problem. In The Weather Riots, everything is based on eleven sets of five pitch classes (you could say "chords"), with every two such chords having exactly two notes in common. Finding the (11, 5, 2) system (though not yet knowing that it had a mathematical name!), I found a specific set of 11 chords in which I would integrate the two maximally opposed harmonic qualities possible in 12-tone tuning. That is, one of the eleven chords was to be a pentatonic scale (stacks of fifths), another one was to be a chromatic segment (stacks of minor seconds). Taking those two chords as my starting point, much of the choice for the other 9 chords was already fixed, and among the options that were left I chose what I felt would give me the most varied harmonic quality.

For Tom, however, it was a question of taking known block designs and then figuring out the best musical forms for them, which led him to quite different problems, such as how to order them, which scales to choose, what instrumentation, what types of phrasing. He's more interested in choosing all that with an eye to making the block design as such musically clear, whereas for me block designs were more like a hidden structure for governing non-hierarchical relations within a free and highly varied polyphony.

Nowadays, I do feel that, after all of Tom's excellent work on them, I should perhaps go back some time to block designs and explore them again in the context of my own interests (which is often more about "musical games" than about "musical structures"). They remain highly suggestive models for organizing musical actions.

Samuel



Some performances of The Weather Riots:

Number Night Ensemble, Amsterdam 2002 (first performance)

Dante Boon & Samuel Vriezen, Vienna 2005

Ensemble of Moments Musicaux, Aarau 2011