Recent “Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries”1

John Supko

As though the river were a floor, we position our table and chairs upon it, eat, and have conversation. —Kay Ryan, The Niagara River2

Embarkations IIn my most recent experimental work I have been seeking ways to create the space in which the music I write is experienced. The work I am making is not music intended to be played in a room in the way a nineteenth century piano sonata or a twentieth century tone poem is performed in a concert hall. Rather, I am striving to compose works that merge the listener’s reality, including location, perception of time, thoughts and memories, with an aesthetic reality of my own design.

In practical terms music can only be experienced in and through time. There is therefore a necessary temporal component to my design. But conspicuously absent from the way in which my music inhabits time is what I call poetic semaphore, an implicit rhetoric embedded in the musical material that conveys formal indications to the listener: This is the first theme. This is the second theme. This is a variation of the first theme. Here are both themes combined. The sonata allegro form tells the listener how to listen to it using eighteenth century patterns of tonal expectation and fulfillment

or frustration. There are exceptions, but most music before Erik Satie—and a good

deal of notated music today, even after, and despite, the innovations of John Cage—

1Cf. Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries : The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed. Jack Beeching (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England; New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books ; Viking Penguin, 1985). With apologies to Hakluyt, who first published this book in 1589, making him quite possibly the world’s first travel writer.

2Kay Ryan, The Niagara River : Poems (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 1.

employs these rhetorical devices, which are not necessarily linked to tonality and moreover not peculiar to music. Roger Shattuck, who has analyzed the evolution of romantic (“transitional”) aesthetics into conceptual (“juxtapositional”) implementations across media beginning in the late nineteenth century, calls these devices “the running commentary” that the “artist confided” on “the materials he assembled... His buts and becauses and althoughs contained the evaluation made by his subjective sensibility regarding and arranging objective content.”3

I choose not to infuse my music with implicit instructions for the listener regarding how to listen to it. By eschewing thematic transition and recursion, and predictable formal symmetries, I remove the necessity for the listener to listen chronologically. In my

conception there is no chronology: no beginning, no end to a composition—only on

and off. I began to work this way in 2003, prompted by a desire to create an open and multivalent auditory experience. I realize now that I was laying the groundwork for what would become my current preoccupation with software processes. At the outset, however, I was a musician with no special training in computer science, and my collaborators only carbon-based lifeforms, the kind that need oxygen between every few phrases of Flatterzunge. A lot has changed in eight years. I can now enlist the programmer’s vocabulary to describe my early experiments, namely the “code” (tempo, dynamics, melody, rhythm, etc.) of my music and the way it is “compiled” (received and interpreted aurally). In pieces like Without Stopping (2003) or This Window Makes Me Feel (2005/2010), where various composed (notated) and ambient (recorded) sound strata surround the audience and shift positions in relation to each other and each listener, I was attempting to deliver this raw code of musical information to the ear in such a way that it would be compiled differently by each listener:

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3Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years; the Origins of the Avant-Garde in France from 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 342.

{

// Here is a string of notes; it may comprise a melody or a fragment or memory of a melody.

[ 62, 65, 46, 63, 66, 51, 58 ]

// Here is a string of rhythms; it may relate to the melodic memory-fragment or it may simply be concurrent to it; it may accompany the notes or it may supersede them in your attention.

[ 0.5, 0.25, 0.5, 0.125, 0.125, 0.5, 0.33, 0.33, 0.33, 1.0 ]

// Here is the sound of a city street: it may be the street behind the door of this room, or it may be the memory of a moment on a boulevard of a distant metropolis that you visited with a lover.

[ open ruegeoffroylasnier_nov.wav ]

// Here are some simultaneously-sounding notes; they may form a chord or they may simply be sounding together just this once; this “chord” may change the way you hear the city street, make the memory of the street or the memory of the melody more intense, or cause your memory-film to jump-cut to another scene; or these simultaneous pitches may cause you to focus on the acoustic phenomena, how the tones beat against one another, the mysterious rhythm at the heart of harmony.

[ iter 68 70 74 52 ]

} The potentialities described in the block comments above are beautiful, but not as beautiful as they could be, and not just because the foregoing is mock code. It’s because they are the top-of-the-head musings of only one person describing his listening; the beauteous odds increase exponentially with the number of listeners

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listening. As an artist I am intensely preoccupied with what one might call the varieties of aural experience. It is an inescapable, mysterious fact that everyone listens

differently—as a species the human being listens differently today than it did a century

ago, and a century before that. I cannot control how a listener listens, but I can try to make it an active experience, an open and fruitful exploration of sonic terrain that involves the imagination, analytical thought, memory, contemplation and perception of non-chronological time, the “time of abstract art.”4 The unity of a work can encompass several temporalities at once: the complex intersection of multiple pasts (memory), multiple presents (repetition) and multiple futures (premonitions), or what Batyushkov calls “memories of the future,” which Shklovsky glosses as “hope.”5

If “the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself” then I want to “increase the difficulty and length of perception.”6 Difficulty, because sounds, like stars, can belong simultaneously to more than one aggregate: the d of Pegasus is in Andromeda’s head;

the sound of an idling bus locates a layer of the music outside the time and place of the auditorium, but it also mixes seamlessly with the live flute tremolos. Length, because I unabashedly consider my work an escape; in my calculus escape is a positive value to be increased. The passage of time facilitates the interweaving of the listener’s reality with the aesthetic reality of the work; at length the ear and mind forget the arousing breach of silence that occurs when a piece begins and instead absorb the content of the music into their secret processes.

Problem setIn 2009 I began to realize that I had reached a saturation point in my work. Constellations can contain galaxies, but chasing after them all will lose one to time and space. Likewise the “code” of my music, the density of detail, the mass of

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4Ibid., 347.

5Viktor Shklovsky, Energy of Delusion : A Book on Plot (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), 3.

6Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," in Russian Formalist Criticism; Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12.

interconnected references, the proliferation of trapdoors and false floors, began to overwhelm me. The structures I was building were larger on the inside than on the outside. My problem can be stated more simply: in an effort to make each successive hearing of a piece a new experience, I was cramming more musical information into the score than could possibly be digested in one hearing. The aborted electroacoustic version of Straits (2009-10) is a prime example of this problem. Each hearing was intended to be mediated by a different, newly-gleaned subset of details. I was thus

simulating an infinity of details; but as long as the end result—the score—remained

fixed on paper, I saw before me the unexciting prospect of perpetuating an inefficient and impoverished mimesis.

I knew I had to search for a solution. The process of committing my work to paper suddenly seemed the most tiresome and arbitrary in the world: the compilation of a

historical record of choices made once over the course of several weeks or months—like the scratching of a grain inventory into a clay tablet. I admitted to myself that I was not really interested in agonizing over this particular interval versus that particular interval, or wondering if this rhythm were too much on the beat or that one too much off the beat. The bewildering musical universe as we know it today, in which Elliott

Carter and DJ Spooky concurrently work—just as Richard Strauss and Milton Babbitt

overlapped unthinkably in the middle of the last century—is so because freed from the objectivity of tonality, it also contains it. The ascendance of juxtaposition as an alternative to transition alone makes sense of these bizarreries. Indeed, juxtaposition makes its own meaning; it is the only law upon which we can reasonably rely, and to my mind it makes handwringing over any local decision (this chord, that beat, this interval) seem superfluous.

I no longer want to chase after my notes and pin them, lifeless, like so many butterflies, in the shadowbox of the score, only to be lugged out of the dusty hutch every so often. I would much rather watch the delicate arc as my notes flew away into the distance.

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What I mean is that I do not want my notes so close to me, and for so long, that I take them for granted, or stop hearing them. The title of my first album, drawn only once, evokes the poignant fleetingness I long for in my work, the listener’s serendipitous apprehension of beauty already departing. To realize this desire, my compositional process had to become a way of creating a musical environment where such moments might occur. And it had to accept the possibility that they might not occur. It had to become a field of possibilities.7

Generative aesthetics

I believe the paraphrase is an authentic creative tool. If today we understand most

media—a painting, a film, a symphony—as “text,” that is, an encryption of information, the creative process throughout history can be viewed, in part, as a progression of paraphrases. Bach’s early organ preludes can be considered paraphrases of

Buxtehude’s compositional form. Beethoven paraphrased Mozart’s style in the Op. 18,

No. 5 quartet. In the 1950s Picasso famously paraphrased Goya, Ingres, Manet and Velasquez (the Meninas series is an extreme example.)8 Tarkovsky’s Offret (1986) is a paraphrase of Bergman’s aesthetic, using his sense of place, his language, his cinematographer, his production designer, his actors, even Bergman’s son as an

assistant. And yet Tarkovsky—like Bach, Beethoven and Picasso—managed to produce a masterpiece.

The paraphrase is a kind of variation, but not all variations are paraphrases. Variation and paraphrase are the twin sisters of creation. Somewhere in the preceding lines I teased out a gentle parody of a title of a book by William James. Doing this vaguely united the idea of listening with spiritual experience. A vague connection was all I

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7Cf. Albert Camus’s epigraphic paraphrase from the Pythian Ode III of Pindar in Le mythe de Sisyphe; also Paul Valéry’s Le cimetière marin: Ô mon âme, n’aspire pas à l’impossible,/ mais épuise le champs du possible. Pindar, Pindar's Odes, trans., Roy Arthur Swanson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), 273.

8Picasso was paraphrasing well before the 1950s. John Richardson has observed the striking similarities between Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and El Greco’s The Opening of the Fifth Seal, which Picasso studied intensely at the home of his friend Ignacio Zuloaga who owned it. Cf. John Richardson, "Picasso's Apocalyptic Whorehouse," The New York review of books (1987).

wanted to make because I would not have known how to persevere in that direction in a way relevant to this essay. But perhaps I was already thinking about another work by

James—The Self and Its Selves—and how a variation of its most famous line would

help explain my approach to generative aesthetics. The reconstitution of musical structure as a field of possibilities where a plaintive melody might materialize, or a spontaneous intersection of a train whistle and a string quartet might occur, or a mishearing of these or of any other phenomena, in isolation or in combination, necessitates the acceptance of multiple attentive selves.9 Acceptance, not development, because the contemporary person has already been conditioned by a culture of myriad technological distractions to attend to information (sonic, linguistic, visual) as the throbbing sum of these multiple “selves.”10 The training of musicians generally does not acknowledge this reality, this oscillating between varying degrees of

attention from intense, active focus to entranced passivity. Nearly everywhere curricula

present music only as an object for rapt, tireless attention—Bach fugue listening. But

what happens when one lets go, when one allows the music to seep into the back of the mind, blending with thoughts, memories and daydreams? Experiencing music this way is just as powerful a mode of attention, yet many feel uncomfortable about it, about giving up control, about getting lost. To my mind, the listener should get lost and love getting lost, just as the composer, even more so, should celebrate the broken compass, the starless or too-starry sky. Shklovsky generously assures us that “no one will contradict the fact that a genius isn’t afraid of getting lost, because talent will not

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9William James, "The Self and Its Selves," in Social Theory : The Multicultural and Classic Readings, ed. Charles C. Lemert(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), 161-166. James’s theory of “multiple social selves” proposes the fluidity and versatility of identity, positing that “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.” I believe that this idea is applicable to the complex experience of aesthetic reception in the age of the internet. Our relationship to media is becoming as complicated as our social relationships, even to the point of replacing them in some cases. The online virtual wold Second Life is an example.

10This is not always a placid relationship. The sheer quantity of information with which someone in 2011 contends can be violently disruptive to the attention span and likewise prolonged, concentrated thought. For an extensive investigation into the effects computers and the internet are having on the human brain, see Nicholas G. Carr, The Shallows : What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). Shattuck observed that there was no longer any “calm” in the post-Romantic artwork itself. I would argue today that it is similarly impossible to expect this “calm” (Shattuck, 340) to characterize the reception of the artwork. I am tempted to replace the ‘e’ of “multiple” with a “y,” as we are now attentive in multiple ways, almost simultaneously.

only show the way out, but talent, one may say, demands delusions, for it demands strain, nourishment, material, it demands a labyrinth of linkages which it has been called to investigate.”11

I want to accede to this demand for a “labyrinth of linkages.” In it one gets lost among one’s discoveries. Retracing one’s steps in the same way is not possible because every discovery changes the discoverer. The old steps belong to a different self.

How do I create an environment in which these “linkages” are ever-changing, ever-renewing, wherein the “plaintive melody” or the “train whistle plus string quartet” (and other phenomena) are constantly recontextualized, disappearing forever, impossibly,deceptively reappearing? Can ears squint? “Tolstoy is squinting his eyes; we are seeing through his squinted eyes.”12 The music is moving before me, leaving me. It would be a shame to capture it, to detain it. I want to relish it in my memory, where I can misremember it, strain to recreate it, mislead myself about it.

I live in my head. A multi-textured interior life is not just something I want my music to indulge, it is symptomatic of my creative process. Engaging in the occasional inner dialogue helps me to think through that process. It will help me to explain it, too:

So what does all of this look like in practical terms? When you sit down to write a

generative piece, how do you begin? I start at the piano, with pencil and paper. I accumulate chords that I like, and sets of successive pitches that intrigue me. I most often end up with too much material. (There is a galaxy of possibilities in the constellation of one chord.) Once I have converted these pitches into numbers the computer can understand, I am no longer limited to what combinations of piano keys my fingers can happen upon (memory masquerading as intuition), or what notational intricacies appeal to my eye (the pitfall of

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11Shklovsky, 39.

12Ibid., 188.

the composer’s vanity!) Instead I can say to the computer: show me something I would have never devised on my own, show me ten million somethings! There is a

sense of exhilaration in that command, but it is a middle-aged thrill—about fifty-five

years old. Unlike Babbitt, whose music I love, I am not interested in creating music of a complexity no human can play. Rather, I am preoccupied with the idea of finding the unexpected emotional possibilities at the core of complex computational processes.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Before the computer can show me anything at all, my pitches must be animated by changing durations, that is, by rhythm. I have to decide the rhythmic characteristics of the piece. These urgent questions are related not only to speed, but also to regularity or the lack thereof. Probability and controlled random choices can make the music more or less regular in a general way, but I can also compose a fixed string of rhythms that recurs indefinitely if I wish to have finer control over the rhythmic profile of the music. Of course, rhythm is but one aspect that must be determined. There are other questions to answer.

Like how the pitches become attached to their durations? Yes. I can spin a string of pitches so that it recurs as the string of rhythms recurs. If the number of pitches in the string is equal to the number of rhythms, the first pitch will always be attached to the first rhythm, the second to the second and so on. If the string lengths are unequal, they spin like gears of different sizes, recombining pitches and rhythms at different positions until at last they simultaneously arrive again at their first positions before restarting the process. This is no new operation; it’s another paraphrase. Machaut was doing the same thing in the fourteenth century. The color and talea of his isorhythmic motets produced the same effect.

Do the pitches, once assigned durations, always stay in their original octaves or

are they displaced to higher or lower octaves? Octave displacement can instantly refresh a set of pitches. I often use this technique. A change of intensity, but not of color, the elaboration of pitch material at the octave

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can cast new light on familiar material, or make the unfamiliar less jarring. Stravinsky transfigured Happy Birthday by employing this technique.13 Mozart used it mischievously to disguise “atonal” material in the last movement of his Symphony No. 40 in G minor.

And how is the decision to octave-displace a note made?

I have to make a software object that manages the note data, outputting it on one of two channels at a time. The first channel leaves the note in the octave in which it was received; the second channel displaces the octave. Between the note manager object and the two channels there is a switch that directs the data from the first channel to the

second channel, like a railroad switch. Controlling the behavior of the switch—when it

changes between the channels—can determine the profile of a melody, among other

elements. I tend to use four basic methods of control, listed below in order of decreasing restrictions:

(1) The switch looks for a specific note or notes; it filters these out to be octave displaced.

(2) The switch counts the notes going to one channel, when the count reaches a specified number it directs the output to the other channel.

(3) The switch instantaneously decides the channel to which it will direct the output at every note it receives; the decisions are based on a specified probability of 1 over 0.

(4) The switch instantaneously decides the channel to which it will direct the output at every note it receives; the decisions are based on a random oscillation of 0 and 1.

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13 Greeting Prelude (1955).

Method (1) provides the most control. If I were composing an environment in which a single note was to be emphasized over a boiling sea of all other possible pitches, I would restrict these pitches to a single octave and allow the filtered note to leap up two, three and four octaves. The decision regarding how many octaves to displace the target note can be handled with one or a combination of the four control methods listed above.

Method (4) provides the least control. Depending on the total number of octaves I allow all notes to be displaced, this method will produce a scintillating, if chaotic, texture. I often use this method to mine unexpected or bizarre melodic material.

Are the pitches ever transposed? If so, how?

Yes. Using control models similar to the four above, I can precisely calibrate the harmonic rhythmic of an environment. If the notes are transposed gradually, one at a

time, momentary dissonances will occur—a noticeable grinding of gears—as some transposed notes clash against the original pitches until all notes are transposed. Adding or subtracting the same value to all active notes in a texture at once will produce a symmetrical transposition, thereby accelerating the harmonic rhythm.I can also program modulatory progressions at any desirable rate of change. With my control models I can specify the exact pitch levels on which these progressions may occur or I can allow the computer to decide via varying degrees of randomness.

Is the overall musical texture monophonic or contrapuntal?

It is important to realize that the procedures I am describing can apply to a single line in a musical texture for one measure or one million measures; they can also apply to many simultaneously sounding lines, creating a contrapuntal texture, for as many measures desired. The decisions regarding textural density or complexity can also be managed using my control methods. I often describe the texture I want to compose in prose before realizing it in code. For example, “a constant solo line accompanied

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intermittently by dissonant chords lasting between four and seven beats and only appearing a third of the total duration of the texture.”

How are dynamics handled?

Dynamics are also conveyed as numbers and can be managed in much the same way pitches are handled. I often use a counter object to create gradual swells and fades in the dynamic level. The serialization of dynamics, from 0 (silence) to 127 (loudness threshold) is an obvious possible application.

What about human musicians? Is there a place for them in this compositional

system?Yes! The possibility of human intervention in this process is perhaps my proudest achievement. By implementing a modification of the INScore system (developed by the Grame Computer Music Lab in Lyon, France) I have created a way for musicians to perform my instantaneously generated music from precisely notated scores appearing on laptop or iPad screens. Because the music is generated instantaneously, the live instrumentalists must sightread the music they see on the screens. I prefer to view this restriction as an opportunity for further innovation. Rather than allowing the relative simplicity of material necessitated by sight-reading musicians to determine the level of complexity of my music, I have recently been concentrating on ways of creating complex composites from very simple parts.

Is it reasonable to describe each performance of one of your generative pieces as

a paraphrase of itself?It is. Each performance is essentially one statistical sample of the total possible results produced by the parameters I specify, like a core sample of the musical terrain the code creates. Put another way, each piece is a like large pot of chicken noodle soup. Each performance is a bowlful of the soup. Sometimes the ladle extracts more noodles, sometimes more vegetables, sometimes more meat, but the soup is always recognizable as chicken noodle.

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I’m getting hungry. Is this what you mean by “creating constant variety while

maintaining constant identity”? I don’t believe I’ve already introduced that phrase into the present essay, but yes, it is. I say that a lot. The building is always identifiable in Monet’s Rouen Cathedral façades, but the chance disposition of light on the building, owing to the different times of day he painted it, provides the serial variety.

But once he captured this “chance disposition of light” in a single canvas, Monet

ceased to perpetuate variety. That’s right. In those paintings, the apprehension of variety is inseparable from the experience of viewing the paintings in series.

How is that different from what you’re doing?

It’s different on the microlevel and similar on the macrolevel. Here’s how it’s similar: listening to two consecutive performances of a generative work will produce the same experience of apprehending variety through seriality. On the microlevel, however, Monet’s brushstroke, once made, is unchanging. In my generative environment, the

musical analog to a brushstroke—a melodic fragment, say a string of three notes—can recur endlessly in infinite variations in the same piece.

❍ ❍ ❍

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As it moves along, we notice—as calmly as though dining room paintings were being replaced— the changing scenes along the shore. We do know, we do know this is the Niagara River, but it is hard to remember what that means. —Kay Ryan, The Niagara River

Embarkations II

I have come this far. I have booked passage, stowed my trunk, traversed the gangplank, shaken hands with the first mate, waved farewell at the railing, changed into a fresh shirt and necktie for dinner, and then promptly forgot that I was on a ship. This vessel is moving slowly through waves of words, yet these paragraphs are like moorings I want to slip. I have embarked, but only now am I beginning to remember what embarking can mean.

Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark!And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark;14

The ancient hope that Machaut inscribed in circles is here Tennyson’s paraphrase: his end is his beginning. I confess it: I’m beginning again just where I thought I might end this essay. It was my hope to convey some sense of my aesthetic thinking, to arrive at, or at least run aground near, the terra firma of an explanation, but as I said, I forgot I was aboard a ship. Carried away by the minutiae of my process, I forgot I was supposed to be the captain. I took no sounding, no stock of my bearings, no heed of my compass. And there were consequences: In a word, I now find that I am lost.

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14Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Crossing the Bar," in Selected Poems(New York: Dover Publications, 1992), 89.

Somewhere I wrote: Retracing one’s steps in the same way is not possible... Still, I have my compass. Perhaps I can regain the course. Look:

Points on my compass

A. John Cage. His work made a proposal for composers to accept or reject. I paraphrase: All sounds are equally interesting, all relationships between sounds are equally valid. It is not necessary to impose an external order on sounds. The sounds themselves are enough.15 Most composers rejected this proposal because it seemed to say that what they were doing, what they trained so long to do, what they loved doing, was pointless. To my mind, Cage’s philosophy was not the end of the story but a most beautiful point of departure, a beginning. My work necessarily involves more control over sound materials than Cage’s did, but I borrow from him the openness to discovery, the eagerness to find aesthetic possibilities beyond the scope of my own imagination, beyond the exercise of my “composer’s will.” I may design the environment in which the phenomena materialize and interweave, but once the environment is launched, I accept any and every manifestation of these phenomena in any combination as the content of my piece.

Cage’s work was revolutionary in the history of music, but not in the history of aesthetic ideas. The opening lines of Lundi Rue Christine are enough to demonstrate that, in concept, Apollinaire preceded him by half a lifetime. The poem reads like a possible transcript of Williams Mix in French translation. In a sense, Cage was paraphrasing Apollinaire’s process, which was in turn, as Shattuck points out, an improvement on the novelist Edouard Dujardin’s “gropings” towards a juxtapositional style in the late 1880s.16 In practice, Cage was paraphrasing

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15 “They say, ‘you mean it's just sounds?’ thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless, whereas I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don't want them to be psychological. I don't want a sound to pretend that it's a bucket or that it's president or that it's in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound.” from the documentary Listen (1992)

16Shattuck, 333.

Duchamp. See below. B. Julio Cortázar. In his novels and short stories he blurred the boundary between the

world outside the book and the world the reader enters between its covers. The experience of reading Continuity of Parks extends almost infinitely beyond its two brief pages. I believe Cortázar’s achievement is to have written a narrative on the

page that gives rise to many, many more—the real stories—that readers create in

their minds while contemplating what they have just read. Cortázar’s influence on my work can be seen in pieces such as Rooms and Inland Ocean. In those works I attempt to counteract the fixedness of the music notated on the page by presenting it in situations that demand malleable interpretation. The tiny loops of Rooms are constantly recontextualized by the randomly generated furniture arrangements announced by an eight-channel surround-sound speaker system. There is no score for my string quartet Inland Ocean, but the parts are five feet long. The way this sea of notated music is navigated in the performance is determined by the players’ choices, which are in turn dependent upon the randomly generated directives hidden in the four-channel electronic component.

Continuity of Parks is for me kindred with Satie’s Vexations in that it is a tiny amount of information producing a seemingly endlessly refracted experience. At the other end of the spectrum is the long, dense, complicated anti-novel Hopscotch. Designed to be read either linearly or by jumping to the chapters indicated by a parenthetical numeral at the end of each chapter, “this book,” Cortázar writes in its Table of Instructions, “consists of many books.” I have always felt that Cortázar was as unsatisfied with the immobility of a page of words as I was with a page of notes, and that Hopscotch represented his most elaborate effort to defy this paralysis.17 The density of the book ensures no two readings will ever convey the same impression of its narrative and characters. This was partly my inspiration in

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17"The general idea behind Hopscotch, you see, is the proof of a failure and the hope of a victory. But the book doesn't propose any solution; it simply limits itself to showing the possible paths one can take to knock down the wall, to see what's on the other side.” Evelyn P. Garfield, Cortazar Por Cortazar (Veracruz: Universidad, 1978).

composing the earlier version of Straits (2009-10), and also my downfall, as I explain

above in Problem set.

C. Brian Eno. In a 1985 meeting with John Cage organized by the journalist Rob Tannenbaum, Eno was “reminded” by Tannenbaum of something he had said years earlier: “The idea is to produce things that are as strange and mysterious to you as

the first music you ever heard.” Cage found this idea “beautiful”—it is essentially a paraphrase of something Cage told Joel Eric Suben in 1983 in relation to his

notational practices18—and agreed with Eno about “the irrelevance of ‘training’ to

the compositional process.”19 Eno’s lack of training, coupled with the sheer abundance of his ideas and their unwillingness to be constrained to one medium, make him a restless explorer. In many cases his explorations (re)visit ideational

extremities and make them palatable to a wider public—no mean feat. His “invention” of ambient music is in fact a paraphrase of concepts explored by John Cage (4’33”) via Duchamp (Sculpture musicale) and Satie (Musique d’ameublement); but given the surface resemblance of Eno’s ambient experiments to older music I am tempted to consider them partially an effort to return to an earlier mode of hearing, to the way the extreme but not alienating fixation of the prelude to Das Rheingold was heard, and even further back, to the extremities of Pérotin’s organum Mass propers.

Eno developed an approach to generative music that culminated in the software system Koan. This system’s more recent incarnation, Noatikl, was important in helping me to shape my own approach to generative music. I have also used it to teach aspects of generative aesthetics in my electronic music courses. Eno believes generative music to be “the beginning of a new era of music.” He has predicted the future customizability of music, suggesting the possibility that “our grandchildren will

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18Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988), 63.

19David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach : The Life and Times of Brian Eno (Chicago, Ill.: Chicago Review Press, 2009), 378-9.

look at us and say, ‘You mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?’”

Eno’s work in visual media has also had an effect on my perspective on multimedia. His 77 Million Paintings have inspired me to find ways to incorporate video more deeply into my own work, reminding me of the strong processual affinity between film and music. I am reminded specifically of my suspicion that the absence of films by Richard Wagner was entirely due to the year of his birth. Satie (born in 1866) allowed the timing of a film’s scenes (René Clair’s Entr’acte) to determine the structure of his musical accompaniment (Cinéma). Mauricio Kagel actually made films (Ludwig van). Birtwistle has remarked that “he would like to have been a film- maker.”20 After 77 Million Paintings, I found myself wondering if I could make a multimedia piece in which both the music and the narrative of a video were generative.

Eno’s philosophy regarding the making of art, concisely exemplified by the gnomic advice contained in Oblique Strategies, has profoundly informed my own. If not singlehandedly responsible for the reinvention of the recording studio as a “compositional tool,” he was likely its earliest theorist.21

D. Vladimir Nabokov. When I first watched his 1959 appearance with Lionel Trilling on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s program Close Up hosted by Kerry Ellard, I was mortified by what I saw. It’s hard for me to discuss this. In the CBC appearance and in another, on the celebrated French literary discussion program Apostrophes in 1975, Nabokov is the only guest speaking from notes. On Close Up, they are sometimes poorly obscured by awkward camera angles and clunky furniture. On Apostrophes his cheat sheets are ridiculously concealed behind an

18

20Jonathan Cross, Harrison Birtwistle : Man, Mind, Music (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 224.

21Brian Eno, "The Recording Studio as Compositional Tool," in Audio Culture : Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner(New York: Continuum, 2004).

enormous pile of his books. To be fair, on both shows Nabokov was speaking languages not his own, although they were languages he learned extremely well and spoke since the 1920s. What most disturbed me was not his nervousness, but rather the incredibly, spectacularly stilted way he was speaking. He was speaking written language, the language of his books, not conversational language. This I

interpreted not only as a desire to control—down to the semicolon—his entire

participation in the broadcast, but also as a desire to assert his aesthetic and intellectual superiority over the others present, almost to the point of denying their existence, such was the pontifical tone of his replies. In the end, he looked pathetic and ridiculous. As I said, it’s hard for me to discuss this. I love Nabokov perhaps more than any other writer. From early adolescence he represented to me nearly everything I aspired to become: seemingly omniscient, consummately cultured, urbane, wicked, ingenious, irreverent, impunibly perverse, rich, a longtime resident

of the Montreux Palace Hotel. But these performances—and that’s what they were,

theatrical performances—wounded me. There’s no other way to say it. Well,

perhaps there is another way to say it: I saw myself in him, saw my venial and mortal sins writ large, and the embarrassment I felt was intimate, personal. I’m not proud to admit that I am presumptuous enough occasionally to conflate my personality, even my identity, with one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century (although I tell myself this kind of self-absorption and delusion is like bran

flakes for an artist.) I even wonder every so often—this is embarrassing!—if I might not be his reincarnation. I cannot satisfactorily explain the origins of these narcissistic arabesques, so I won’t make the attempt.

In the last sentence of Nabokov’s longest novel, Ada, just before the final semicolon, a “doe [is] at gaze in the ancestral park” of one of the “various villas” his protagonist Van Veen “has erected all over the Western Hemisphere” in which to dwell with his love, Ada (who happens also to be his sister.) But this park, like Cortázar’s, is no

ordinary sward. It is the scene of another crime—a double suicide—as the lovers

attempt to “die, as it were, into the finished book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose

19

of the book or the poetry of its blurb.” This escape into the novel, rather than an arrival at a neatly choreographed close (“tied up with a bow,” I call that sort of thing) for the benefit of those holding the book in their hands, hit me like a freight train when I first read it. I learned from this ending how to develop a healthy selfishness, a cool disregard for the perceived expectations of reception in favor of a jealously guarded aesthetic vision. Rather than reassure the reader that the aged couple contentedly spent the rest of their days in golden senescence, the book melts away before one’s eyes, in one’s very hands, just as Nabokov hinted it would. And it isn’t even certain that Van and Ada do, in the end, self-destruct because their intention is qualified by a conditional clause: “if our time-racked, flat-lying couple ever intended to die...”

E. Sophie Calle. Her process is extremely close to my own. This closeness leads me to believe that she has had an influence on my work. In some of her installations she creates an environment, decides the limits, if any, of her behavior in the environment, and then makes it accessible to the public who are free to interact with her. This interaction adds a risky unpredictability to her work. I would argue that it is out of this precariousness, the serendipitous moments of interactivity, that her work derives its most fragile beauty, its most beautiful fragility.

F. Sol LeWitt. Before the development of software, and certainly before artists ever thought to use software in their work, Sol LeWitt was transmitting his work in code, instructions to be followed in order for the work to be rendered visible. If indeed the visual representation was deemed necessary or desirable by the person “compiling” the code, for as the artist himself declared in Sentences on Conceptual Art:

10. Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually

20

find some form. All ideas need not be made physical. 12. For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not. 13. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind. 27. The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.22

At various points in my career, especially during moments of crisis, I have found contemplation of LeWitt’s work restorative and therapeutic. I believe this is because it represents an objectivity concerned principally with the mystical conclusions that logic cannot reach.23 In other words, I see in LeWitt’s work a way to follow “irrational thoughts,” what I would call mysterious thoughts, “absolutely and logically.” Since the 1960s composers have found inspiration in what has come to be known as his “process art.” The musical fruits of these inspirations tend to make plain exactly how the processes are directing the music. I have studied and loved many of these works, but now I find myself more interested in LeWitt’s evolution, how his influence on music might change the more we know about how he changed. For instance, I’m very curious to know more about the late gouaches and the nature of “their own logic.” But I suppose I never will. “Only I can do the gouaches, ” LeWitt said.

G. David Markson. Reading him is like reading books composed only of musings on subjects that interest me intensely: poets, painters, novelists, musicians, thinkers and other assorted oddballs. Here I choose the word “composed” very carefully because it is literally, etymologically accurate: Markson wrote his books by putting together (i.e. componere) a string of disconnected, anecdotal paragraphs, each written on index cards in the manner of Nabokov. Unlike Nabokov, finalizing a book meant finalizing the ordering of index cards. Sparsely interwoven among the jump-cut paragraphs, are the thinnest of narrative details. Usually autobiographical in nature, they are gracefully, elliptically sketched as if by an ultra-fine point. The experience of gradually perceiving these narrative features, like a gentle, intermittent

21

22 Sol LeWitt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," in Conceptual Art : A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 106-8.

23This is my paraphrase of Sentence 1. “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” (Ibid.)

undertow beneath the oceanic expanse of Markson’s consciousness, is deeply satisfying. In my mind I connect it with the experience of reading Nabokov’s Pnin, which Graham Greene described as “hilariously funny and of a sadness.” Like Markson’s narratives, Pnin’s sadness is tucked away in little pockets of the text, so subtly that one is only conscious of having processed it in retrospect. Before reading Pnin, I had never experienced the startling apprehension that a funny book I had just finished was also a very sad one. Before reading Markson, I had never realized how present an author could be in his work by saying so little. If Markson is not alone in this achievement, I can only think of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life as comparable, but in an utterly different way.

H. David Lynch. My recent phrase “the oceanic expanse of Markson’s consciousness” is likely related to the impression David Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish left on me. In it, he writes, “Inside every human being is an ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness.”24 It is in venturing down into the depths of this ocean that one

finds the most original ideas—the “big fish.” Lynch explains that “Down deep, the

fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”25 I loved this approach to understanding consciousness so much I tried to incorporate it into a piece. The very title of my string quartet Inland Ocean makes reference to this “body” of consciousness “inside every human being.” In my program note, I wrote:

David Lynch has likened consciousness to an ocean. That means we all have at least a puddle sloshing around inside each of us. Collectively the puddles, lakes & streams make an inland ocean.

Have questions? You can write to Inland Ocean, Inc. at P.O. 6949, San Antonio, TX 78209 USA.

22

24David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish : Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006), 24.

25Ibid., 1.

Accessing this ocean means being at peace with seemingly disordered arrangements of what Shattuck calls “raw lump[s] of thought.”26 Juxtaposition makes its own meaning, I wrote pages ago. The only logic that can be said to connect these “lumps” is a kind of “dream logic.”27 Dream logic is the reasoning we accept for improbable events in dreams. While dreaming we are not troubled by conflated time periods, contravention of the laws of physics or the ability to speak languages we have never learned. It all seems to make sense until we wake up and start analyzing. Dream logic is the logic of David Lynch’s films. We watch as if seeing through the mind’s eye in a dream. When I say that I want my work to give the impression of being a memory of itself, or to sound like misremembered music, even at the first listening, I am expressing a desire to imbue my pieces with dream logic.

The recent advances in artificial intelligence research are impressive, but it is obvious that the Turing Test will not be aced anytime soon, if ever. Ray Kurzweil would disagree, but I think it’s like Zeno’s paradox. Researchers will continue to come closer to simulating human thought processes with a computer, but will never actually successfully duplicate a human brain with silicon. This potentially impassable distance between man and machine presents me with an opportunity. By carefully manipulating multiple parameters, I can get a computer to compose melodies spontaneously that sound almost as if written by a thinking, breathing, expressive human being. Almost. There’s still something not quite right, something off. The general profile that melodies tend to exhibit has been

defamiliarized—Shklovsky’s остранение (ostranenie)—by the combination of my

programming limitations and the computer’s affective and aesthetic limitations as a performer. (One could argue that these are actually the same thing, since the

computer only does—and does exactly—what I tell it to do.) Contextualizing or

recasting this defamiliarized quality as a function or malfunction of memory is one of my greatest preoccupations. Left to its own devices, the computer can be a clunky

23

26Shattuck, 333.

27Ibid., 344.

bore. But given the right context, it can become a tremendously poignant collaborator, a box of chips and wires that wants desperately to sing. This is one of the many things I learned from my teacher, the pioneering electronic composer Paul Lansky.

I. Gertrude Stein. Anytime I cite William James—and I have done so more than once

in the present essay—there is always, buried somewhere, a connection to the work of his student, Gertrude Stein. What first attracted me to her work in childhood was its difficulty. I doubt that it would have been as complex, or as good, if she had not studied with James, from whose worktable she likely gathered the first scraps of thought that became the idea of the “continuous present.” In The Stream of Consciousness, James declares the nature of consciousness, “sensibly continuous” although

“no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before. Now we are seeing, now hearing; now reasoning, now willing; now recollecting, now expecting; now loving, now hating; and in a hundred other ways we know our minds to be alternately engaged.”28

Compare those assertions with these lines from Composition as Explanation, Stein’s 1926 address to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge:

Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same. So then I as a contemporary creating the composition in the beginning was groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again and then everything being alike then everything very simply everything was naturally simply different and so I as a contemporary was creating everything being alike was creating everything naturally being naturally simply different, everything being alike.29

Each generative work I compose, each performance of a generative work, even each moment within each work, is a “beginning again and again,” a tireless seeking- out, a ricercare, a recherche. Stein beautifully demonstrates that repetition can be creative, generative: “beginning again and again and then everything being alike

24

28William James, "The Stream of Consciousness," in The Principles of Psychology(Cleveland & New York: World Publishing Co., 1892).

29Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Stein (New York: Vintage, 1990), 520.

then everything very simply everything was naturally simply different...” Elsewhere in Composition as Explanation, she details the exhaustive and exhausting process of writing her colossal book The Making of Americans. “Having naturally done this I naturally was a little troubled with it when I read it.”30 The trouble came from the suspicion that she would never get close enough to achieving her goal of describing everyone who ever lived, that her project was infinite and probably futile.31 This was exactly how I felt when I realized I had hit the saturation point in my work described above. Stein’s solution was to change her perspective:

Whether there was or whether there was not a continuous present did not then any longer trouble me there was or there was not, and using everything no longer troubled me if everything is alike using everything could no longer trouble me and beginning again and again could no longer trouble me because if lists were inevitable if series were inevitable and the whole of it was inevitable beginning again and again could not trouble me so then with nothing to trouble me I very completely began naturally since everything is alike making it as simply different naturally as simply different as possible.32

Rather than simulating the “infinitude of details” of all there was to describe in the world, matching word for atom, she began “using everything” as possible

descriptors of everything else—since “everything is alike.” In her own way, Stein

was accessing Camus’s champs du possible and exhausting (épuiser) it. Thus “Eye Glasses” receive this description in Tender Buttons: “A color in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the center of an alley.” As Ulla Dydo remarks of the final words of Composition as Explanation: “Stein spoke them one way. The careful reader hears in the mind all at once the innumerable ways in which they can be spoken and can have meaning.”33 I might describe my aspirations for the reception of my music in the same way.

25

30 Ibid., 518.

31Ulla Dydo describes it this way: “Stein always insists on the importance of small things—an infinitude of tiny details rather than a collective totality.” Ulla E. Dydo and William Rice, Gertrude Stein : The Language That Rises : 1923-1934 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 95.

32Stein, 519.

33Dydo, 96.

J. Willam S. Burroughs. In The Ticket That Exploded Burroughs offers an excellent illumination of juxtapositional aesthetics. While this is not surprising from the writer best known for his use of the “cut-up” technique, the appeal to multimedia is unexpected.

What we see is dictated by what we hear. You can verify this by a simple experiment. Turn off the sound track on your television set and use an arbitrary recorded sound track from your tape recorder: street sounds . . music . . conversation. . recordings of other TV programs, radio et cetera. You will find that the arbitrary sound track seems to be appropriate . . people running for a bus in Piccadilly with a sound track of machine-gun fire looks like 1917 Petrograd.34

The human brain is designed to make such connections, it seeks out these “linkages,” as Shklovsky calls them. As an artist my instinct in relation to this phenomenon is to find ways to exploit it, to create aesthetic environments in which this faculty must be applied. Restricted to text alone, Gertrude Stein’s description of eyeglasses invites the reader to do this: the “color” is seen, perhaps fleetingly, by eyes wearing eyeglasses “[while] shaving.” Similarly, the author can declare the “saloon... well placed” by virtue of spatial relationships she perceives with her eyeglasses. These lines are descriptive of the glasses in a way that assumes the intermediary steps of putting them on and looking through them. Were Stein to continue this manner of description, as she does in longer sections of Tender

Buttons, the process of circling round the idea of an object as though it were

physically present, gradually listing not only aspects related to its appearance but also to its position and function, would make these “assumptions” slightly less mystifying. Confronted with the combination of sight and sound, however, the brain is, as Burroughs asserts, profoundly more efficient at bridging these assumptions. It wants to find a way to correlate image with audio. The brain instantaneously resolves the dissonant perception that the soundtrack of a city street scene has been exchanged for that of a weapon firing by replacing it with the next most plausible interpretation: a scene from a war.

26

34William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 205.

K. Marcel Duchamp. In my mind, the words “escape” and “evasion” are not synonyms. My usage of the word “escape” is necessarily vague, elliptical: escape from... I tend

not to reveal—perhaps because I do not know—just what I am escaping. “Evasion”

has an urgency about it that is too close to “avoidance.” It doesn’t quite fit my meaning. Years ago I wrote in my program note for Littoral:

“To be elsewhere;” “to have one’s head in the clouds:” the limits of language underscore the complex intersection of the interior life with the physical world. The prospect of moving between two real or supra-real points; of constant, renewable, replenishing flux; the freedom to change course at any moment—to escape! These are more alluring to me than any destination plotted on a timetable. The ancient paradox is an invitation: arrival is an impossibility lying half an inch away.

Here again Zeno’s paradox—his most famous one, anyway. Again the ship,

again this interior life, again twin (but different) sisters: Constantia and Renovatio.

Again my work as voyage; voyage as constant escape, as renewal. Motion electrified by potential: to turn, to reverse at any moment.

Duchamp expressed a “need” for this potential: Il y a toujours eu chez moi ce besoin de m’échapper.35 He was talking principally about his reluctance to answer directly questions about his work, but the works themselves are always slipping away from us. The beautiful lines and figures complicated by technical diagrams (Le Moulin à café; Réseaux de stoppages étalon), the obscure messages of elaborate and painstakingly crafted montages intercepted by damage (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même; To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour), the ambiguity of intention, the suspicion of hidden laughter (Porte-bouteilles; Fountain).

I’ve often wondered why Duchamp was content not only to allow works like La

Mariée mise à nu and To Be Looked at—each representing lengthy and laborious

preparation—to remain in their semi-devastated states, but why he was delighted

27

35John F. Moffitt, Alchemist of the Avante-Garde : The Case of Marcel Duchamp (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 263.

that they were damaged in the first place. When I was younger, I couldn’t help imagining how sublime To Be Looked at must have been before it was shattered. Now I think I understand. Duchamp’s artworks were not limited to or constrained by their materiality. The physical aspect was only one manifestation of the artist’s ideas; the pristine condition of this aspect was therefore not absolutely necessary. In this approach Duchamp’s influence on Sol LeWitt and others can be traced. These sentences bear repeating:

10. Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical. 12. For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not. 13. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind. 27. The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.

When John Cage was, in his own phrase, “just being born,” Duchamp was conducting chance-directed experiments. His chosen medium was music. For at

least one piece—Erratum musical—he produced a score conventionally notated

except for the lack of rhythmic information. In 1913 a musical composition totally devoid of the “composer’s will,” to reuse Cage’s phrase, was a breathtakingly radical proposition. Indeed it was much more radical than Stravinsky’s or Schoenberg’s famous contemporaneous works. (Erratum musical was unknown until 1934 and even then not performed until the 1960s.) There was both a practicality and an arbitrariness behind Duchamp’s choice of music as the medium for his work. He made Erratum musical on a visit to his very musical family and intended it to be performed by two sisters and himself. But the concept of this work exists outside of music; it does not need music to exist. Consequently the musical result is outrageously and bewilderingly alien. Duchamp could have recorded the random order of scraps of paper pulled from a hat in any number of media. I find this irreverent disregard for the conventions of music beautiful. It’s a kind of blasphemy, an escape from exterior control, an expression of total and complete freedom.

28

L. Markov chains. In my pursuit of techniques that foster “constant variety while maintaining constant identity” I began experimenting with Markov chains. They are a simple way to recombine existing relationships between all kinds of information to

form new relationships. I first started using Markov chains to manipulate text. I

suppose I should say here that from my earliest pieces—Eight Chagalls (1996), for

example—unusual ways of weaving words into my music have been an important preoccupation. Contemplating the results of using a Markov chain to generate new text from existing texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Thomas Browne and Henry van Dyke helped me to find a way to arrange my materials in Inland Ocean. Here’s the very first sentence I generated with a Markov chain: Philosophy has not yet

determined the nature of the virgin forests of America. I knew I was onto something, so I spent a week generating 4000 more sentences. After winnowing this list to about 1000 sentences, I began to see a pattern in the sentences. Many of them were related to the characters of Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea (1840). The sentences seemed like answers to questions, so I created a dialogic structure in which a computer voice asks questions I wrote about the characters, and my voice offers the computer-generated answers. Before using the Markov chain, I had no idea that this was the way that Inland Ocean would be structured. The “rightness” of the solution surprised and delighted me. I keep working with computers in this way because I know that they will continue to show me things about my materials that I would never see on my own.

M. Wolfram classes. Recently I had a series of conversations with Erik Schultes, an expert on cellular automata who suspects that chaos as we describe it does not really exist. Rather, he told me, what we see as disorder is actually the multilayered web of fragmented patterns, or that the complete patterns that are present are too complex and too large in scope for the human brain to identify and understand. Erik calls this the “All-Possible Everything.” In one email I wrote to him:

29

I had a thought yesterday during a presentation by a visiting composer who works on animal “song” -- bird song might be an interesting place to look for filtration of your "all-possible everything." The songs can sound both "random" and "musical." -- I guess the slight instances of "motivic manipulation" or "melodic development" in birdsong are the reasons people get interested in studying them.  I also learned that a territorial song of a European blackbird can be as long as 20 seconds & yet the part of the song that the other birds respond to (in other words, the part that tells the birds to keep away from the singing bird's territory) is only half a second long!  The question is, what're the other 19.5 seconds for?!?!

Erik uses Stephen Wolfram’s four behavioral classifications of cellular automata: (1) evolution to stasis; (2) evolution to stable oscillation; (3) evolution to a “pseudo- random or chaotic state;” (4) “the edge of complexity,” that is, the saturation point of discernible pattern complexity before evolution into Class 3. It’s interesting to try to assign these classes to composers. In Class 1 I would place LaMonte Young (Composition 1960 #7) and in Class 2, Philip Glass (Two Pages). Classes 3 and 4 are more tricky to assign. Do Boulez’s works Structures and Le marteau sans maître go in 3 or 4? Likewise Cage’s Music of Changes or Williams Mix? I’m inclined to put Boulez into 3 and Cage into 4, but not without reservations.

N. Adolf Loos. There is something mysteriously similar about the way this essay begins and the clarification Adolf Loos gave regarding his work in 1930. Look:

In my most recent experimental work I have been seeking ways to create the space in which the music I write is experienced. The work I am making is not music intended to be played in a room in the way a nineteenth century piano sonata or a twentieth century tone poem is performed in a concert hall. ... In my conception there is no chronology: no beginning, no end to a composition—only on and off.

• • •

My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces (cubes). I do not design floor plans, ) facades, sections. I design spaces. For me, there is no ground floor, first floor, etc... For me, there ) are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces, etc. Storeys merge and ) spaces relate to each other.36

I did not intend, but willingly accept, if not suspect, the possibility of Loos’s direct

influence in this passage. He embodies for me an uneasy—and thus attractive— equilibrium between ideological infatuation and nostalgia in the early twentieth century: the cold, dogmatic exterior of the Villa Müller, his masterpiece, stands in

30

36 Adolf Loos, Shorthand record of a conversation in Plzeň (Pilsen), 1930

exquisite dissonance with the tastefully mismatched bourgeois furnishings Loos chose and carefully arranged, as he did with all of his buildings, for its interior. His interiors strike me as wistful, conciliatory, almost apologetic. He cannot hate completely the ornaments of the Sezessionstil or the earlier, more decadent ornaments of imperial Vienna that his architectural aesthetic seeks to replace, forget or destroy.

O. Erik Satie. The subject of my doctoral dissertation, Satie remains my patron saint

—“St-Erik d’Arcueil.” He was a composer’s composer, inseparable from his aesthetic vision, his processes and systems, no matter how arcane or how impossible to articulate completely. He was unable or refused to accept received musical conventions. In the first half of his career he operated under the fantasy that the organic development of plainchant into the contrapuntal glories of the Baroque never took place. He began where the Dark Ages left off. Later he looked outside of music, principally at painting, for the way forward. He wanted to make musical “transpositions” of paintings. In 1914 he created (with artist Charles Martin) the first truly multimedia work, Sports & Divertissements, synthesizing music, painting, text and calligraphy. In 1924 he wrote the first film score in history, but I believe he had been constructing music in a manner similar to image projection as early as 1912. The ostinato in the left hand of d’Holothurie from Embryons

desséchés creates a repetitive mechanical motion—it reminds me of the rotation of

the Muybridge zoopraxiscope—over which passes intermittent “scenes” in the right hand part, accompanied by narration. These are scenes of a “morning outing” that takes place on a partly-cloudy day (le soleil est dans les nuages) in the Bay of St. Malo:

31

Figure 1: Opening of I. d’Holuthurie from Embryons desséchés37

32

37Erik Satie, Embryons Desséchés : Pour Piano, 1913, Eschig, Paris.

“Numerical water”

My work often summons the figure of water: its endless versatility, both figurative and literal, the silence of its expanse, the mystery of its constancy, the melancholy of its flux. In anatomizing this last feeling, Robert Burton compared the “disagreeing likeness” of melancholy’s various “symptoms” to a river in which “we swim in the same place, but not in the same numerical water.”38 He must have known that he was

paraphrasing—again the eternal paraphrase!—St. Thomas Aquinas, who four hundred years earlier produced the analogy of “a flowing stream, in which there is always water, yet not the same numerical water, but as some flows on, other flows into its place.”39 This sounds to me like the “stasis in progress” of Günter Grass, a concept he devised in the course of composing his “variations” on Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I.40

Variatio and Pαράφραση, those twin sisters again.

Pages and pages ago, I wrote: The music is moving before me, leaving me... When it appears to return, it is already departing; always disappearing, but never fully vanished. In the earlier technical conversation I had with myself, it seemed out of place to ask if my preoccupation with leaving, with escape, was actually an addiction to melancholy. That’s halfway to Sehnsucht.41 The thought that I am using technology to negotiate an utterly Romantic motivation is both comforting and worrisome. Comforting because it gives me a foothold in the past, a heritage, an origin; worrisome because I can never know when a loose stone in the crumbling bridge that links yesterday and tomorrow might send me plummeting into the breaks below.

33

38Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London; New York: J.M. Dent; E.P. Dutton, 1932), 281.

39Thomas Aquinas, "Lecture 5, Book I", Priory of the Immaculate Conception http://dhspriory.org/thomas/Meteora.htm.

40Günter Grass, From the Diary of a Snail (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).

41Das Sehnen = yearning; Die Sucht = addiction

Under another bridge, Apollinaire’s Pont Mirabeau, “there flows the Seine,” its waters

evoking—as if confirming Burton’s surmise—certain causes and symptoms of

melancholy: lost love, lost joy, lost hope, boredom, nostalgia, oblivion. And as in Tennyson, the night descends and there are bells: Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure. But Apollinaire is not embarking, he’s waiting, watching as life passes away, as love passes away, and noting that neither will return.

In my work I want to be both Tennyson and Apollinaire, simultaneously embarking on a voyage, and yet left behind on the shore, addicted to waiting, to watching, to experiencing the passage of time and knowing the futility of trying to slow it. In this way, I fuse the roles of composer and listener, I become my first listener. It is a process of constantly losing oneself and finding a new self, of navigating the “numerical water,” whether from prow or from port.

34

Bibliography

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