Notation has provided an interface between composers and performers in the European art music tradition for hundreds of years, yet musicians’ understanding of the significance of notation is always changing. Notation can mean anything, from an idealised visual representation of how a piece of music should sound to a set of instructions that performers can use to produce a musical event, and a composer’s notational practice will usually occupy a number of positions along this continuum from ideogram to instruction. Today, any composer who uses notation to communicate musical ideas must first try to resolve how this graphic interface will function in their work, not only to make that communication as effective as possible but also as a means of understanding the nature of their own creativity.

As is the case for most musicians, my understanding of notation derives from practical engagement with it, and in this chapter, I want to relate ideas about notation to specific examples from compositional practice in the last eighty years, some of them drawn from my own work as a composer. I will move from a consideration of staff notation, the symbolic language at the heart of western art music, to a more extended reflection on notations that go beyond this familiar code, either by inventing new graphic devices or by replacing dots and squiggles with words. The chapter goes on to a discussion of scores whose content is transmitted orally and aurally rather than through notation, and concludes by exploring some hybrids of these different approaches.

Above all, I want to address what seems to me to be a central issue in all notated music, the status of the notation. If something has to be written down, are these marks the beginning of a creative process or are they an objective that needs to be successfully achieved? Although this is a question whose significance has varied from era to era, composer to composer, piece to piece, it has always yielded interesting answers. Some musicians, whether composers or performers, may be reassured by a process that culminates in a predetermined goal, when the music has been ‘got right’. Others find the alternative – a process in which the music gradually reveals more and more of its potential – more exciting, and it is the ambiguity implicit in this latter process that I particularly want to explore, just as, in old maps, the clear delineation of known territory hints at the opportunities in the unknown lands beyond.

Notes, Staves, and Clefs

For much of the twentieth century and for most musicians practising within the western art music tradition, the conventional understanding of music notation was that it offered a graphic representation of how music would sound. If, in rehearsal, a composer asks a performer to make a more aggressive attack at the beginning of a note, the performer can point to the score and ask why there was no accent on the note. Or, if the composer asks that a dotted rhythm be played more smoothly, the performer can ask why the rhythm was not written as a triplet. In each case the performer may be implying that there is a mismatch between the score and the composer’s conception of the piece; that the composer’s head held a version of the music which had not been fully and faithfully represented by the notation. Or the performer may also be trying to imply that the mismatch between the score and what the composer now wants is evidence of incompetence: the composer’s notational skills, or their aural imagination, or perhaps even both, are faulty. Whatever the performer’s motivation, the exchange is the product of a shared understanding of the score: that it represents something that has been imagined and then represented symbolically, in such a way that it can be accurately realised in sound.

In the twenty-first century, however, the near-universality of the use of music-processing software has introduced a new point of friction. Composers often create their music in software, listening to simulated versions of their scores as they go along, and the transition from this virtual realisation of their work to the actual reality of live instruments in a physical space can sometimes be quite shocking. Software tends to make some changes in notation – pitches, rhythms, registers, for example – much more audibly effective than others and the default instrumental sounds in most notation software will not allow a student to hear, for example, how much the timbre of a flute varies across its range or how different types of bowing can transform the sound of a string instrument. Some instrumentalists will have even heard student composers complain that their music ‘sounded much better’ in programs such as Sibelius, Finale, or Dorico. Yet the problem here lies not so much with the students or the software authors as with the composition teachers who have allowed their students to accept a view of the musical universe in which, as Daniel Leech-Wilkinson describes, the score has the status of ‘divine law’.¹

If the score has such an aura of authority, then composers can also use this as a defensive weapon. After conducting Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1953) at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1958, Bruno Maderna reassured Stockhausen that although the performance had not been very good, it nevertheless ‘made the piece known’ and that audience members would be able to read the score and ‘correct what the performance had omitted’.² The history of notation, however, has consistently demonstrated that scores are conditional documents, contingent on compositional and performance practices that change over time. In the twentieth century, composers’ fascination with noise-rich instruments, and percussion instruments in particular, led to notational compromises such as those in the scores that John Cage made for his works for prepared piano. In the scores for Amores (1943) and Sonatas and Interludes (1948) Cage uses staff notation and appears to notate pitches, but in reality the score prescribes the piano keys to be played. The sounds which emerge from the prepared piano strings rarely contain the pitches shown in the score and the details of the music’s richest domain, its proliferation of extraordinary timbres, are invisible.

The conditionality of scores means that they require interpretation: a rich and complex process, often affected by the amount of notational information provided. Some performers read carefully and conscientiously, others are keen to hurry into action, and composers must decide the extent and types of information that they provide since this will, in turn, affect the ways in which performers exercise their interpretative powers. In choral music singers today expect to sing from a score that shows them all the vocal parts, but in most instrumental chamber and orchestral music the practice has been to play from an individual part. The German composer Hans-Joachim Hespos, on the other hand, has always insisted that in his ensemble music all the musicians should, like singers, play from copies of the full score; he believes that this gives them a much better understanding of their role within the music. If interpretation is contingent upon the amount of information in the notation, then, necessarily, much of what follows will be as much about interpretation as it is about notation.

Notation is in part a codified visual representation of musical events (descriptive) and in part a set of instructions for performers (prescriptive). It falls roughly into three sub-categories:

1. 1. more or less conventional scores,

2. 2. scores in which the visual domain is emphasised, and

3. 3. scores in which visual information is more or less replaced by verbal instructions.

In my own music the majority of works fall into the first of these sub-categories; their scores use staff notation, specifying a series of note-events with fixed pitch, timbral, and durational characteristics which are to be interpreted in sequence, and the staves read from left to right, from the first page to the last page. Presenting so much of my work in this way has been pragmatic. As a student I became fascinated by the notational innovation I found in graphic scores such as Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (1963–7), but I also discovered that performing musicians are often suspicious of any departure from conventional practice. This became particularly clear when performances of my music began to move from the relatively indulgent ambience of the university campus into the world of professional concert-giving.

For a host of economic and aesthetic reasons, British musicians and promoters favour music that can be prepared for performance quickly. Consequently, the visual presentation of the music is expected to be as straightforward as possible; five minutes spent in explaining an unusual notation to a performer is five minutes of expensive rehearsal time lost. I soon decided that the notational experiments that had been a feature of many of my student scores would have to be sacrificed, at least temporarily, on the altar of affordability. This Faustian pact seemed unavoidable if I wanted professional musicians in Britain to play my music, and there were honourable precedents: I knew of a number of composers who had made realisations that converted the complex abstractions of their original score into more conventional notations. John Cage had turned the multivalent materials of Fontana Mix (1958) into Aria (1958), Cardew had extracted Volo Solo (1965) from Treatise (1963–7), so I too made performance scores which fixed the variable elements of my sketches.

This became my normal working method throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s, a compromise, but one from which I gained a much greater sense of the different sorts of interpretative space that could be incorporated within apparently conventional notations. I became fascinated by the ways in which performers would prioritise different levels of notational detail and I began to experiment, enriching or impoverishing some of these levels in such a way that the performers could be led towards what I regarded as the heart of the music. In the clarinet and hi-hat cymbal duo, Reeling (1983), for example, I was interested in the vitality of the rhythmic counterpoint between the two players, in the timbral contrast between the different registers of the clarinet and the different tonal properties of the cymbal, and in a sense of virtuosity at the edge of technical possibility (Example 12.1).

Example 12.1 Christopher Fox, Reeling (1983), opening.

© Christopher Fox.

The score is very precise in its specification of pitch content for the clarinet, rhythmic content for both players, and the use of the pedal for the percussionist. By contrast there are very few expression marks, nor does the score offer either player anything as useful as a pause for breath or an easy page-turn. The initial response to the piece from the dedicatees, clarinettist Roger Heaton and percussionist Nigel Shipway, was a telephone call after their first rehearsal – ‘we can’t play it and it doesn’t sound very good’³ – yet their performance had exactly the vitality I had wanted. Nevertheless, and with their comments in mind, I have often explained to the work’s subsequent performers that the score is an indication of what should be done rather than a definitive representation of what has to happen. It is unlikely that the clarinet part will ever be played exactly as it appears in the score but, in making the attempt, each clarinettist presents not only their version of the piece that I wrote but also a revealing portrait of their technique and their energies. Reeling is not a piece that is intended to be safe.

Signs of Emancipation

The concept of the notated musical work as an entity which may embrace many different realisations is not a new idea. It has always been one of the great strengths of notated art music that the identity of, say, Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony is flexible enough to allow interpretations as various as those of Otto Klemperer, Arturo Toscanini, or Roger Norrington, which stretch the temporal and timbral characteristics of the music in a number of different directions. On the other hand, the body of musical material – the disposition of pitches and rhythms to a collection of instruments – that Beethoven created and the order in which that material is presented are essential constants in any performance that bears the work’s name.

If performances of the ‘Eroica’ (or Kontra-Punkte or Reeling) can never encompass all the interpretative potential of those works, then perhaps we should regard what became known as ‘graphic notation’ as a logical extension of this principle. Certainly, the symbolic ambiguity of most graphic scores is the antithesis of what Richard Taruskin has called the ‘literalism’ of Toscanini’s approach to notation⁴: one cannot play music com’e scritto [‘as it is written’] if what is written is intended to be open to a host of different interpretations. But if the aesthetic roots of this revolution in notational practice are debatable, its beginnings are not and, as with many of the developments in post-1945 European music, the proceedings of the Darmstadt Summer Courses give us a precise date for the moment when these developments entered the consciousness of the international avant-garde. In 1959, Stockhausen organised a series of six Darmstadt seminars under the title ‘Musik und Graphik’ [‘Music and Graphics’] and his introductory lecture was published in the Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik [‘Darmstadt Contributions to New Music’] in the following year.⁵

In the published version of the lecture Stockhausen traces the development of notational practice in European music from the Middle Ages to the present, illustrating his thoughts on contemporary graphic notations with Sylvano Bussotti’s Piano Piece for David Tudor #1 (1958), a page from Cage’s Concert for Piano, Cardew’s Klavierstück 1960, two pages from Mauricio Kagel’s Transcicion II (1958), and a page from his own Zyklus (1959). Stockhausen is typically thorough, assessing the implications of these very different works and the extent to which they have anything in common beyond being innovative. He is interested in the distinction, new in 1959, between different types of music: tape music, whose sounds can exist without a score but are in a fixed form (although Stockhausen expresses some concern about the durability of the tape medium itself); notated music in which the score is a fixed performance text; and ‘graphic’ music in which the notation is, as he saw it, ‘emancipated’ from realisation.⁶

Whether or not the validation of Darmstadt had anything to do with it, the production of graphic scores flourished for much of the decade after the ‘Musik und Graphik’ seminars. Composers as various as Jani Christou, George Crumb, and Gavin Bryars made scores in which staves were contorted, new symbols devised, and performers’ imaginative participation invited. Some looked like architects’ plans, others like surrealist frottage; some required the virtuosity of skilled improvisers, others were intended to stimulate the imagination of school-aged children or amateur musicians. In Treatise, Cardew created a graphic score whose sustained visual inventiveness lifts it out of the sonic domain so much so that no performance is ever likely to capture the sense of coherence offered by a solitary reading of the score as the eye traverses its symbolic fantasies. To borrow Stockhausen’s formulation, Treatise’s musical notation is so thoroughly ‘emancipated’ that it is effectively beyond realisation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, interest waned: graphic scores were more likely to be found in art galleries and museums, or decorating music publishers’ offices, than on composers’ desks or performers’ music stands. The compositional priorities of composers engaged in minimalism, spectralism, neo-romanticism, and complexity – the most vigorous aesthetic tendencies of the period – were not incompatible with the ambiguities of the graphic score. The deliberately restricted harmonic and rhythmic pattern of minimalism depended on the conventions of staff notation for its exact delineation, as did the acoustic phenomena carefully modelled in spectralism, although there are also instances in the scores of Gérard Grisey or Horatiu Radulescu, for example, where transitions between different acoustic phenomena are notated less precisely. In contrast, the creative practice of neo-romantic and complex composers was bound up with the possibilities of conventional notational practice; their music is enabled by staff notation and its capacity to articulate, respectively, the revisionist gestural language of a composer like Wolfgang Rihm or the information saturation of a score such as Brian Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study III (1974).

As a young composer I had become fascinated by the expressive potential in the graphic scores of the 1960s, but I also became aware that such calligraphic extravagance was regarded as a thing of the past by more mature composers. By the end of the 1970s my continuing enthusiasm for notational invention was definitely old-fashioned, and this sense that the ‘Musik und Graphik’ moment was over provided another motivation for me to use more conventional notations in the music I wrote over the next two decades. The emergence of a new generation of performers in the 1990s, however, saw a revival in a more inventive approach to the sign language of the score.

The musicians of groups like Apartment House in Britain and the Ives Ensemble in the Netherlands were interested in exploring the earlier innovations of avant-garde and experimental composers; they were also ready and willing to explore new work which built on these innovations. In scores such as Everything You Need to Know (2001–2) for the Ives Ensemble, or Chromascope (2005) for Apartment House, I presented them with a mixture of notational approaches: some familiar, some created specifically for these works, but all of them rooted within a notational tradition that goes back to the graphic scores of the 1950s and 1960s. This intertextuality is evident in my Generic Composition #5 (2000), for example, one of a set of instrumental solo works within the collection of scores which makes up the ensemble installation work, Everything You Need To Know (1999–2001). Its most obvious ancestor is Cage’s Aria: likewise a solo work that can be performed individually or can be heard within a larger work, whose score consists of a series of sloping lines, and, as in Aria, where the performer has to choose a variety of different types of tone production with which to interpret these lines (Examples 12.2 and 12.3).

Example 12.2 John Cage, Aria (1958), opening.

Reproduced by permission of Edition Peters.

Example 12.3 Christopher Fox, Generic Composition #5 (1999–2001), opening.

© Christopher Fox.

Similarly, Chromascope is a descendant of Stockhausen’s Plus Minus (1963) and Cardew’s Solo with Accompaniment (1964), the latter itself a parody of the Stockhausen score, which Cardew had premiered in 1964. I had worked on a realisation of Plus Minus for the Ives Ensemble, for concert performances in 1999, and for a recording in 2002; I had also heard Apartment House give a number of performances of Solo with Accompaniment, and Chromascope is a score that, like the Stockhausen and Cardew works, consists of a series of matrices, each of which defines the behavioural features of a musical moment (Example 12.4). The main difference between Chromascope and its ancestors is that its matrices can be decoded in minutes, instead of the hours it takes to decode Cardew, or the days needed to convert the Stockhausen into notations from which musicians can actually play. The other significant difference is that Chromascope consistently counterpoints four different matrices, one for each musician. In the Stockhausen each matrix provides the stimulus for all the musicians involved and in the Cardew there is a simple dialectic between the solo (mostly consisting of long notes) and the accompaniment (made up of the matrices).

Example 12.4 Christopher Fox, Chromascope (2005), first three matrices.

© Christopher Fox.

By shifting the focus from the score to the musicians I wanted to enable a creative process that was less burdened with the task of reading and much more about playing. The matrices in Chromascope may be relatively simple but they yield rich musical results, and because each musician has their own matrix, it is much easier to hear the particularities of what they are doing; in other words, the nature of each musician’s playing and their interpretative response to the score is much more audible than in either Stockhausen or Cardew. This in turn reveals another aspect of graphic scores: because their notations are usually less specific than those in conventional scores, different interpretations will tend to be rather more evidently informed by the aesthetic preferences of the musicians involved.

My return to graphic score production coincided with similar interest from a new generation of composers. The collection Notations 21 demonstrated the extent and variety of this activity,⁷ as does the work of Claudia Molitor. Molitor makes scores which involve many different types of notation, some conventional, others not, but her innovations go further still. She has made scores that involve the paper engineering found in the ‘pop-up’ books produced by children’s book publishers, in particular the use of strips of paper which can be pushed and pulled from side to side so that different notations appear at windows cut into the score. The same playfulness is evident elsewhere in Molitor’s work, from the rapid switches between different sorts of musical material, to the use of sounds which are more usually associated with children’s play, to the exuberance of those passages in her scores where graphic invention takes over from staff notations. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the passage in untitled (fizzy paintings make me happy) (2007), written for Apartment House, where a strange alien creature – a note elf, perhaps? – appears out of the middle of the score, seeding the staves with symbols (Example 12.5).

Example 12.5 Claudia Molitor, untitled (fizzy paintings make me happy) (2007), p. 2.

Reproduced by permission of Claudia Molitor.

Grasshoppers and Stones

The advent of the text score was another development of the 1960s which, like the graphic score, was generally disregarded for much of the next three decades. The earliest significant text score is perhaps the prose notation of Cage’s 4’33” (1952) but the medium flourished in the 1960s, first with the Fluxus movement, particularly George Brecht and La Monte Young, and later with Christian Wolff, Stockhausen, and the composers associated with the Scratch Orchestra. The most successful text scores have a precision rarely found in graphic scores: La Monte Young’s Piano Piece for David Tudor #3 (1960), for example, presents the performer with just seven words; ‘Most of them were very old grasshoppers’. It is an image that suggests both a particular soundworld – a performance that did not sound anything like grasshoppers might well be regarded as a failure – and a way of making sounds – perhaps a performance could involve grasshopper-like activity and yet not produce grasshopper-like sounds? But there is scope for fantasy too, in the inclusion of a variable (‘most of them’) and the conditional ‘very old’. Christian Wolff’s Stones (1968) is more obviously prescriptive – as are all the pieces in his Prose Collection (1968–71) – yet it too leaves room for the performer’s imagination (Example 12.6).

Example 12.6 Christian Wolff, ‘Stones’, Prose Collection (1972).

Reproduced by permission of Christian Wolff.

One might say that text scores delineate fields of musical activity and offer guidance as to how to operate in those fields; graphic scores, on the other hand, present images that, like the notations of more conventional scores, are intended as representations of the music. There is an illusory element in the notated score, whether ‘graphic’ or ‘conventional’, which is absent in almost all text scores. Cardew’s Treatise is organised sequentially and continuously, in the manner of a traditional score, but because its symbolic discourse has been so thoroughly abstracted from the aural into the visual domain it is peculiarly resistant to the instrumental interpretation that is the intended outcome of any traditional score. Stockhausen’s Plus Minus appears to have the visual authority of a set of electrical circuit diagrams but turns out to be more like a collection of linked riddles whose answers have frustratingly unpredictable consequences for anyone engaged in realising the score.

As I suggested earlier, a score like my Reeling is similarly partial in its notation, inviting interpretation without immediately revealing in which areas of the music that interpretative endeavour will be most fruitful. Text scores, by contrast, are usually less ambiguous. Because the very specificity of words makes language an awkward tool with which to describe and define musical events, successful text scores tend to be succinct and readily memorable. It is soon clear in most text scores which aspects of the music have been fixed by the composer and which are open to performer intervention. The first sentence of Wolff’s ‘Stones’, for example, is a series of straightforward instructions (‘make sounds with stones’), with just one conditional clause (‘using a number of sizes’). The second sentence opens up a series of options that performers need to resolve before they try to play the piece: what ‘other surfaces’ to use, how to sound the stones without striking them, how to avoid breaking things.

Alvin Lucier has made particularly effective use of the medium to articulate the specifications of a series of distinct musical entities. His scores are often the outcome of protracted periods of research into particular sonic phenomena and are designed to enable people other than Lucier to reproduce sound-generating situations that he has already successfully created. Necessarily their instructions are very specific: ‘Place an EEG scalp electrode on each hemisphere of the occipital, frontal, or other appropriate region of the performer’s head’ (Music for solo performer (1965)); ‘Extend a long metal wire (#1 music wire or equivalent) across or length-wise down a performance space … Drive the wire with a sine wave oscillator’ (Music on a long thin wire (1977)); ‘Find or make an object which can be excited by sound and which has at least one resonant frequency which lies within the range of the instruments in your group’ (Risonanza (1982)).

Yet the scores also often include suggestions which propose variations around the central idea of the piece. Usually these are practical options for performance: in Risonanza, for example, performers can amplify the resonant object, or their own instruments, or they can use a sine-wave oscillator to excite the object continuously as an additional ‘non-breathing’ player. In other scores these alternatives move beyond practicalities into a more fantastical domain. The score of Gentle Fire (1971) includes two long lists of sounds, each defined by a noun preceded by an adverb; electronic transformations are to be made so that sounds in one list come to sound like sounds in the other list: ‘creaking doors’ could become ‘ringing alarms’, ‘tapping canes’ become ‘clogging drains’, and so on. But the text ends, ‘store in your mind an imaginary synthesizer with which … you can wilfully bring about such transformations … without the help of external equipment’, an instruction that takes Gentle Fire into the same virtual territory in which, as I suggested earlier, the most satisfactory readings of Cardew’s Treatise take place.

More recently, as with graphic scores, there has been a revival of interest in the text medium among younger composers. In the UK, a 2012 book by James Saunders and John Lely entitled Word Events anthologised a range of scores from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. Lely’s work for bowed string instrument, The Harmonics of Real Strings (2006), is an elegant example of his own text scores (Example 12.7).

Example 12.7 John Lely, The Harmonics of Real Strings (2006).

Reproduced by permission of John Lely.

As in Wolff and Lucier, Lely’s text score centres on a single acoustic phenomenon and prescribes the techniques with which to make that phenomenon sound. There are variables – how slow is ‘slowly’, how long is ‘after some time’? – but there is a post-minimal rigour too – the string is bowed ‘regularly’ and the movement of the hand stopping the string is ‘consistent’, so the piece will always have a very clear two-part structure and a very visible mode of progression to its conclusion.

Shared Practices

No account of notational practice in recent music would be complete without a discussion of its absence. The western art music tradition is so thoroughly based on the concept of composition mediated through notation that it is quite shocking to think about a composed music for which there is no score. Yet to perform without a score is often seen as signifying an extra degree of authenticity: pianists and singers memorise scores because audiences imagine that this means that they are somehow inhabiting the music more completely. From the mid-1970s Stockhausen has insisted that performers of his music should commit it to memory and in the performance notes for his ORCHESTER FINALISTEN (1996), the second scene from his opera MITTWOCH aus LICHT (1995–7), he suggests that ‘many orchestral musicians aspire to play soloistically without risking a career as soloist’ but that this work will enable them to ‘demonstrate their musicality and skill by … playing from memory … and projecting their personal aura’.⁸

The opposite approach is found in the works that Éliane Radigue has been making since early in the twenty-first century. This is music that must be performed from memory because it has never been notated, music made in collaboration with particular performers and existing only in their memory. For each of the works within the ongoing series entitled Occam Ocean (2011–), Radigue has invited performers to her Paris apartment and then spent a number of days with them, talking, playing, listening. Images are discussed and then used as the basis of improvisations from which Radigue chooses particular sounds. The performers refine this soundworld, with and without Radigue, and at some point she declares the work ready for public performance.

Radigue describes this process as a ‘heart to heart’ transmission and her work has inspired a renewed interest in ways of making music that do not involve notation, what the composer Luke Nickel describes as ‘orally transmitted’ music.⁹ Nickel’s own work falls within this category, as does that of Cassandra Miller who began to make orally transmitted scores in 2014. Like Radigue, Miller’s compositional method is centred on close collaborations with particular performers, ideas being exchanged both in rehearsal rooms and remotely through recordings, but eventually, as with Radigue, a work reaches a point where it can be learned, ready for performance.

Collaboration with performers has always been important in the development of composed music and has often provoked questions about ownership. Duke Ellington’s Concerto for Cootie (1940) grew out of its recurrent melodic figure, a twisting ear-worm that Charles ‘Cootie’ Williams, one of the trumpeters in the Ellington Orchestra, would play as he was warming up before concerts. It is Ellington who is identified as the composer of the piece, but Williams would later say that it was ‘entirely mine’.¹⁰ When Stockhausen released recordings of the 1969 performances of his text score collection, Aus den sieben Tagen [‘From the Seven Days’] (1968), the trombonist who had played in the ensemble, Vinko Globokar, similarly questioned how his improvising could become a composition for which Stockhausen took the sole credit.

Juliet Fraser, the singer with whom Cassandra Miller has collaborated on a number of works, most notably the series entitled Tracery (2017–), has also questioned why a ‘shared practice’ in the development of new works does not translate into ‘shared capital’ in the finished work, although she acknowledges that her contribution is perhaps not yet ‘co-composition’. Fraser believes that we are at the beginning of a ‘slow, collective shift’ in the way in which these questions about authorship and curation are resolved, but no chapter on the notation of recent music would be complete within some consideration of these issues.¹¹ The creation of notated scores has been, throughout the history of western music, whether ‘pop’ or ‘classical’, the way in which ownership is reified. That ownership confers capital but, in music that is only brought into being by collaboration, to whom does it belong? What happens to this capital if, as in the work of Miller, Nickel, and Radigue, the only ‘score’ is lodged in the memory of its performers or if the music is passed on to other performers. If it is not passed, how will it survive?

Whether the content of a score is transmitted orally from composer to performer, through staff notation, graphic notation, or a text, it will inevitably be limited by the medium within which it is created. As I have suggested throughout this chapter, each medium also has its own particular set of restrictions, variables, and ambiguities, and these in turn offer territory in which the imaginations of composers and performers can flourish. In this final section I want to consider one further possibility, a marriage of elements that uses text alongside graphic and staff notations.

In my own work I have developed this approach most thoroughly in the ensemble work hearing not thinking (2006–8). There are seven separate instrumental parts, one each for an unspecified woodwind instrument, trombone, bass drum, accordion, prepared piano, guitar, and an unspecified bowed string instrument. Any performance of the work can involve any four instruments; no more because each instrument should always be audible, no fewer because the desired effect is that each instrument should always be heard through the others. Each part consists of only one page, and each uses a different sort of notation.

When musicians are confronted with a score in which notations are preceded by introductory textual explanations, they will almost always start to play the notation without reading the text. Consequently, in hearing not thinking all the text material is on the same page as the other notations and runs down one or both sides of the score, describing and defining how the instrument is to be played. The graphic symbols in the centre of each page notate the incidental detail of the playing, the aspect of performance which text struggles to express. In the bass drum part, for example, these graphic symbols present not only a web of timed connections between single or double strokes of the stick on the skin but also a map of the position of each stroke on the skin (Example 12.8).

Example 12.8 Christopher Fox, Hearing not thinking (2006–8), opening, bass drum part.

© Christopher Fox.

It is evident that the way a score presents information to a performer has a significant influence on how they understand their interpretative task. Good musicians especially will seek out the spaces available for their own creativity, and because different approaches to notations privilege particular ways of communicating musical ideas to performers they create types of space and different types of interpretation. Since so much compositional energy has been expended in developing each of these media, it seems foolish for composers not to continue using all these possibilities, although not necessarily all of them all the time.

Yet the widespread availability of composer notation packages has made composers today, and perhaps young composers especially, far less likely to practise notational innovation. Typesetting programmes have had an insidious influence on composers’ imaginations: why try to imagine music which will be awkward to notate on the computer? Why think about the sounds of real instruments or the behaviour of real musicians when a key stroke will start and stop the playback of the notes on the screen? It is a paradox of contemporary musical life that computer typeset scores are legible but do not read well. The conservatism imposed by the default settings of notation software is surely only temporary, however, and the new ways of thinking about notation will continue to flourish.

Listening List

https://shorturl.at/otyL0

The emancipation of sonority, timbre, and texture as essential aspects of compositional thought is among the defining stories of twentieth and twenty-first century music. Whereas the essential substance of, say, Bach’s Art of Fugue (c.1740–6) can be understood principally in terms of pitch and rhythm relationships (harmony and counterpoint), a comparatively abstract work from the mid-twentieth century, Messiaen’s Mode de Valeurs et d’Intensités (1949) for solo piano, is incomprehensible without the array of dynamics and articulations which serve to define the form and character alongside pitch and duration. The musical matter consists in the play of sonic detail. Looking to the large-scale, whereas orchestrational decisions were predominantly influenced by conventional instrumental roles before the 1950s, the striking identity of an orchestral work like Ligeti’s Atmosphères (1961)¹ is inconceivable without its textural precision: notes become imperceptible atoms, and we experience the gradual shaping of the global sound-mass. Such a conception of the orchestra owes much to mid-twentieth-century technological developments. The post-war availability of resources for exploiting recorded sounds (‘musique concrète’) and for synthesising ‘new’ ones from basic elements (‘electronic music’) represents a historically seismic shift of compositional possibility.²

Electronic media enabled composers to work purely in sound itself, without the need to mediate through notation. ‘The sound’ was thus freed from ‘the note’. It was also freed from ‘the act’, electronic and recorded sounds implying a decoupling from physical or embodied causation. Imbued with a newfound immediacy, sound could be an independent phenomenon. This chapter discusses composers who, inspired by such a conception, proceed from the ‘the sound itself’ as a compositional resource. The important context of electronic media notwithstanding, our focus is on compositional aesthetics in the work of predominantly instrumental composers.

To ‘proceed from the sound itself’ in the sense intended here is to make compositional decisions with some level of regard for cutting through the abstract frameworks imposed on musical space, such as by temperament and instrumental design. We consider composers who can be characterised by ‘mistrust of abstraction … [and] attention to immediate perception’.³ Wary of over-simplification, we posit two notionally opposed compositional attitudes. The first proceeds inwards, to the spectral structure of sound; the second, outwards from the sound, towards idiosyncratic instrumentaria. Our purpose is to illuminate various composers’ relationship with ‘the sound’ rather than to survey or frame a historical tradition. Nonetheless, by way of context, we cite Edgard Varèse, Giacinto Scelsi, and Karlheinz Stockhausen as luminaries.

Varèse’s radical musical vision was defined by a search for greater – more varied and more subtle – control of sound than was possible by the means at his disposal. Writing in 1924, he proposed:

For Varèse, who strove to treat ‘[s]ound as living matter’ and ‘musical space as open rather than bounded’,⁵ dividing the octave into intervals was restrictive, obstructing the possibility of working with the vibrations beneath the ‘surface’ of sound as perceived – or most certainly as written. Towards the end of his career, he was able to realise his conception with electronic media: Déserts (1950–4) and Poème Électronique (1957–8) cohere a diverse array of sonic materials, giving us a glimpse of his ideal ‘organised sound’. The earlier works are distinctive for their unconventional instrumental groupings even among his radical modernist contemporaries. Composing the ensemble was an essential part of composing the piece for someone who ‘occupied himself primarily with tone colour, to the extent that other aspects – harmony, melody and rhythm – were subservient and indeed reduced to their most elementary form’.⁶

Giacinto Scelsi’s music is yet more elemental. During a period of personal crisis – so the story goes – he recuperated by repeatedly playing the same note on the piano, for hours on end. In this act of directed, focused attention, he perceived that this single note was in fact a fluctuating multiplicity; a sonic world in itself. This discovery profoundly influenced his music. In Quattro Pezzi su Una Nota Sola (1959) for orchestra, ‘material’ and ‘form’ are reduced to something elementary by conventional standards: ‘minute sonic fluctuations (vibrato, glissandi, spectral changes, tremolos) become not mere ornaments … but the text itself.’⁷ Each strike of Scelsi’s piano key, the qualities of the sound(s) arising were determined by instrumental design and intonational calibration. Respectively, these two factors derive from foundational conceptual frames for Western music prior to electronic resources: instrumental or vocal timbre (standardised sonority, rooted in conventional playing techniques, instruments, and ensembles) and harmony (musical grammars based on fixed intervals, underpinned by temperament).

The intervals used in scales and modes correspond approximately to the relationships between a fundamental and the lower partials of the harmonic series: the first overtone sounds at an octave, the second at a (compound) perfect fifth, and so on. Moving up the harmonic series, octaves recur as whole-integer partials (1:2, 1:4, 1:8, and so on), but otherwise, the parallel breaks down: the intervals in a scale recur consistently from one octave to the next, where the number of overtones doubles in each successive ‘octave’ of the harmonic series, such that the difference in pitch between two overtones varies from one to the next. This variance is ‘corrected’ in intonational systems to facilitate octave equivalence that enables scales. Johnston’s perceived ‘lie’ consists in this (de)tuning: the intervals that we hear in tempered music are really just imitations of the overtone relationships. Thus harmony – on which Western music is founded – is a derivative of the harmonic spectrum; timbre is the source. Moreover, as organisms we are hard-wired to hear intervals:

Stockhausen, who studied acoustics alongside conventional musical training, was also concerned with perception of sound. His creative exploration at the WDR studio in Cologne led to theoretical reflection, and several years later he noted:

Like Varèse and Scelsi, he refers to sounds as having inner ‘lives’, accessible when they are broken down beneath the perceptual level at which they are heard as ‘whole’ (‘Splitting the Sound’ is the second criterion). Resident in an electronic studio, Stockhausen was able to ‘compose’ sounds from the elemental level upwards, having seen that they derive their character from changes in amplitude amongst the overtones above a fundamental frequency.¹¹ Thus, besides its harmonic aspect, the ‘inner life’ of sound also has a temporal one, based as it is on changes of amplitude within a single sonority.

Proceeding Inwards: Towards the Spectral Structure of Sound

‘Spectral thinking’ evokes the idea that knowledge of the inner structure of sound informs composition.¹² A source sound, once recorded, might be put through a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and spectrally analysed. Such algorithmic programmes map frequential salience, empirically: they analyse all the frequencies present within a sound, including those beyond the audible range. The output is a visual representation of the inner life of the source sound, which might be composed-out, to inform temporal structures (the changes of emphasis within the range of partials over time); and ‘vertical’ ones (the characteristics of the range at a given point). This implies the replacement of the concept of ‘pitch’ with that of ‘frequency’ (measured in hertz (Hz)). The potential for perceptual interchange between harmony and timbre resides in this ‘frequencial harmony’.¹³

The property that defines a collection of frequencies as a ‘spectrum’, rather than a ‘chord’, is their ability to fuse into a single perceptual object; we hear a sound rather than a root, third, and fifth simultaneously. There is compositional possibility in the inherent tension between unity and multiplicity that spectra possess. Whether listeners are presented with ‘a sound’ or ‘sounds’ may seem a simple matter, but it can have profound ramifications.

Breaking down a sound to its constituent parts is central to spectral thinking, so fusion and fission is inevitably a compositional domain. It also translates to the listening experience. The idea of frequential harmony enables sounds to cross perceptual thresholds: composers can present sounds undergoing fusion/fission, rather than merely as fused/diffuse – an object that is heard as a combinatorial harmony at first can be made to transmute, such that it is heard as a unified timbre.

The matter goes beyond harmonic/timbral aspects, however. Grisey himself chose to refer to ‘liminal’ rather than ‘spectral music’,¹⁵ elsewhere distinguishing spectral thinking from serial aesthetics on the basis that parameters are dissociated in the latter.¹⁶ Naming ‘identity’ as a potentially manipulable property of a sound, Harvey invokes the role of perception per se. Discussing phenomenal relief in perceptual ‘surfaces’ in music, Clifton says: ‘[o]ne always perceives events as occurring, or objects being “on this or that side of a line”’.¹⁷ He distinguishes the opening of Atmosphères as phenomenologically flat, lacking any perceptual ‘edges’:

Although Atmosphères is dependent on equal temperament, Clifton’s ‘particles within a medium’ could be reread as ‘partials in a spectrum’ – that phenomenal space exists ‘inside the sound’ is the starting point for composing with spectra. However, this ‘attitude to sound’ branches out into diverse compositional approaches. Horatiu Radulescu and Kaija Saariaho manifest spectral thinking in radically different, even opposed ways.

Proceeding Outwards: Towards Idiosyncratic Instrumentaria

‘Instrumentarialists’ take a hands-on pre-compositional approach, to assemble, build, discover, and/or develop new timbres from extant instruments and materials. We cite Helmut Lachenmann and Frank Denyer as exemplars. Both are strikingly individual outsider-figures, notwithstanding Lachenmann’s influence on younger composers. Nonetheless, they share certain pre-compositional attitudes: a decided rejection of theoretically underpinned cultural-received ideas; a concern to work in, with, and on the physical means of sound production, leading to an extended and original timbral palette; one way or another, the general lack of vertical harmony creates a focus on immanent presence in performance – their music demands intimacy of its listeners.

Case Study 4: Frank Denyer

Denyer’s music uses instruments from all over the world and throughout history, as well as other found, invented, and modified instruments. The instrumentarium reaches its zenith in The Fish That Became the Sun: Songs of the Dispossessed (1991–4) which brings together a few ‘marginal’ conventional instruments (three double basses and contrabassoon, harmonium, heavily muted solo violin, eight cornets), but with a large ensemble of others, disinherited from their original contexts. Denyer’s relationship to sound is informed by his having worked in non-Western cultures, notably in Kenya, India, and Japan. His book In the Margins of Composition (2019) gives insights to his aesthetic, including reflections on the significance of personal experiences on his music.

Physically, all sounds have a finite existence and then die away, but certain sounds linger in the memory and appear to be more than common sounds. They enjoy complex, and sometimes even bizarre afterlives through our minds. These afterlives are given their specific character, colour, and rationale by the cultural context in which they occur.³⁵

The aesthetic is subtle: there is a direct appeal to memory, through immediate acoustic impression. Timbre is a primary portal to meaning, although not in ignorance of sociocultural factors. One such memory is that of the ‘tiny singing voice’ of a woman sat in the desolation of a flood of the Sabarmati river in Ahmedabad.³⁶ He had to lean in to hear, even at a metre’s distance. The moment is notable for its intimacy, as a product of its quietness, two distinctive features, especially of Denyer’s recent music. ‘Composing for the unaccompanied, unamplified solo voice can be thought of as equivalent to a painter working with the nude. It is to reduce music down to its fundamentals … ’.³⁷ This reduction manifests throughout the output in pure melody, monodic lines focusing attention on fine microtonal nuance, as well as subtle changes of colour, thickness, and relief. The music does away with vertical organisation, such that listeners might grasp more of ‘the whole’ than in other music. It is motivated by a desire to promote intimate communion between individuals through a shared focus on sound itself.

Music encodes its precise secrets within abstract tonal relationships that are fleeting and difficult to apprehend. Still more elusive are the resonances, associations and memories these tonal relationships evoke … music is not only an art of remembering, but an art of forgetting as well. Attempts to resolve this dichotomy through composition go some way to explaining my attraction to the unaccompanied monodic line. I find monody an effective antidote for the excess of quantity in today’s world.³⁸

Denyer’s aesthetic is distinctively individualistic, grounded in the importance of perceived timbre, but also in his own experiences and introspection, and in memory and culture. It is difficult, and seems improper, to make general or summative statements; In the Margins of Composition is itself composed of fragments, the ‘reading’ perhaps forming in ‘the spaces in between’. Example 13.1 shows a passage from The Fish That Became the Sun, which brings together the themes mentioned earlier. Non-Western, found, and invented instruments³⁹ all feature here. The extreme quietness of these tiny sounds focuses attention on fine details and subtle differences, and the question for perception is fundamental, and introspective: ‘Are there sounds, what are they, and do they relate?’, rather than ‘How does the texture fit together?’.

Example 13.1 Frank Denyer, The Fish That Became the Sun (1991–4), fig. 21.

Reproduced by permission of Frank Denyer.

Times, Spaces, Identities

Discussion has been centred on aesthetics and pre-compositional processes until now. These leading to the act of composition, and ultimately being in service of listener perception, in this section of the chapter we consider two works from these perspectives: Gérard Grisey’s Vortex Temporum (1994–5) and Christian Mason’s Zwischen den Sternen (2018–19). Both commissioned by the Freiburg-based Ensemble Récherche, they treat the nature sound itself as a compositional resource. Grisey being regarded as one of the originators of spectral thinking, his major work Vortex is canonic – it directly influenced Zwischen; both pieces require instruments to be tuned to spectral partials; neither is full-blown ‘instrumentarial’. Zwischen certainly uses a ‘composed ensemble’ in the Varèse tradition, its bass woodwind instruments, steel drum, and ‘handkerchief harmonicas’⁴⁰ having a vital influence on the composite sound.

Both pieces employ quotation; a device, which is itself a convergence of times, spaces, and identities. Listening not only involves cognition but also involves recognition; not only of, say, a musical motif, but also of identities such as instruments and even sounds as distinct from one another. An aesthetic focus on immanence need not become a hermetic seal. So far, our designation ‘inside the sound’ has referred to phenomenal space – that of fundamentals and partials. In Zwischen den Sternen, the focus shifts to physical space; as it were, the ‘sound in the room’ rather than ‘the room in sound’. In Vortex, similarly, the time internal to the sound is notionally released, stretched, and compressed.

Case Study 6: Christian Mason

Christian Mason’s Zwischen den Sternen (‘Between the Stars’) is based on a spatial premise: listeners are literally brought ‘inside the sound’. The form is articulated by the progressive displacement of the eight musicians, their continual reconfiguration aligned with ongoing musical relationships. The ensemble comprises a wind trio (bass flute, bass oboe, and bass clarinet), a string trio (violin, viola, cello, each doubling corresponding scordatura instruments, tuned to partials 7–15 of a C-spectrum), and piano (also scordatura) and percussion. The piano, percussion, and cello are all stationed on stage, in front of the audience, for all nine movements of the form; the other instruments move between various positions behind the audience, on stage, and surrounding the audience, at the points of a star (Figure 13.1). In a performance, space – and movement through it – plays a formative influence on listener experience, not only because of location, but also in terms of composite timbral identity.

Figure 13.1 Performance space layout of Zwischen den Sternen (2018–19).

© 2019 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden.

The most distal configuration occurs at the outset, most of the ensemble placed behind the audience. Musical material is shared such that instrumental identities are called into question. In bar 7, a ‘barely audible’ steel drum tremolo begins at the back of the stage, entering in sustained unison with bass flute (at the back of the hall). Slowly, they grow louder, emerging from the resonance of the piano, the flute passing imperceptibly to violin and bass oboe (also behind the audience, on the same side), the energy of whose brighter spectra support the ensuing crescendo. At its peak, the steel drum reveals its unmistakable identity – so far having been presented as a continuous tremolo, there have been no perceptible attacks, only a hollow resonance. The energy, once gathered, culminates in a brief melodic burst (b.8). This model – ‘emergence into identity’ – recurs and intensifies throughout the first movement, the steel drum usually the protagonist. The musical material is elementally minimal: besides this crescendo gesture, only a few melodic scalar joins are added to the opening pair of dyads. It is a non-developmental ritual, the potential for repetitiousness transcended as the distal strings mimic (or echo) the bright steel drum with their own wild bursts of natural harmonics. Individual instrumental timbres intensify, but otherwise the principal musical matter is the dispersal of sonority from the stage around the audience: Zwischen opens up space as it begins in time.

The proximity of audience members to the sound changes as the music progresses. Four ‘moving moments’ employ short static or repetitive materials, that neutrality focusing listener attention on the spatial change in the global sonority, as players move around, playing from memory. The first three bring the musicians closer to one another and towards the stage; the last is one of Mason’s characteristic ‘exit processions’ in which the ensemble walks out of the hall, playing a repeating four-bar phrase, leaving behind a solo cellist. Wind and strings play a spectrally tuned harmonic progression, which repeats as they leave; percussion and piano exit playing ‘handkerchief harmonicas’. A faint thread of communication is maintained between the separating layers, the violin and viola harmonics sounding as increasingly distant echoes of the improvising cellist.

Zwischen ends in dissipation. Its structurally opposite state – the maximum contraction – occurs in the fourth movement, ‘Everything is far’. With the full ensemble together onstage, the string trio play their scordatura instruments. Previously, notional ‘chromatic’ and ‘spectral’ grids were held in tension; this change brings the strings into resonance with the piano. The closeness of the musicians enables melodic movement at different rates (time layers) to cohere, and continuous tempo changes (rallentandos and accelerandos) become a significant musical feature. Each bar represents a felt ‘beat’ (always articulated by the piano) within which a semiquaver micro-pulse passes through the hocketing string trio. The percussion articulates the start of each new section, while sustained woodwind dynamic shapes propel the energy towards arrival points. The zenith is reached (at Fig. U) in a brief quotation from Grisey’s Vortex Temporum which soon dissolves into a notionally static moment of pure resonance (at Fig. W). This resonance is created by a large – visually as well as sonically striking – crystal bowl surrounded by snare drums (with snares on) which act as resonators. As the bowl vibrates, we hear the sympathetic resonance of the drums move in a circular motion around the bowl, creating a sound reminiscent of distant ocean waves, and defining a micro-space through which our attention is drawn into the sonic phenomenon.

Conclusion

Concerns with the immanence and immediacy of sonic identities are present one way or another in the work of all the composers discussed, informing their thinking at a higher level than specific compositional techniques. Immanence because the inherent energetic properties of sound(s) can be seen to influence their compositional decision-making; immediacy in the sense that their work generally presupposes the possibility of a direct (un-mediated) relationship between the listener and the sound phenomenon, who meet – as it were – at a particular intersection of time and space. Yet, many of our examples also reveal ways in which sounds can invoke and evoke ideas and associations beyond themselves. To compose with ‘the Sound itself’ is also to compose within the web of connections that likely precede the act of composition. This need not necessitate the rejection of a wider field of associations. On the contrary, it implies the need to remain aware of the fact that ‘meaning is located in the processes occurring between the sounds of music and people, rather than being invested in the sounds of music themselves.’⁴⁷

Listening List

https://shorturl.at/dxZ89

There are many different traditions that could be signified by ‘composing with electronics’, spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and located across traditions of art musics, popular musics, and even work that is outside of that designated as musical practice, such as in radio studios. The title of this chapter might suggest several traditions: one of combining electronic sounds and tools with acoustic instruments; one of composing with electronic instruments; one of designing and creating electronic tools; or even one of the many DIY music cultures that combine aspects of these approaches. All of these compositional outcomes are ‘electronic’ in the sense that they employ circuits at some stage in the creative process. However, the difficulties inherent in such a description are self-evident: the presence of electronic circuits in music-making says nothing of the sound of this music, the traditions that may have influenced it, or the intentions and interests of its composers’ nor the motivations behind the compositions themselves. Rather, through several historical examples from the mid-twentieth century and three contemporary examples, I here explore a range of approaches, motivations, and sounding results across examples of electronic music that give an idea of the plurality that is – and has always been – present within this area of composition.

The histories of composing with electronics are many and varied. To offer some potential definitions of what composing with electronics might be, and some examples of the diversity of its practice, I sometimes use the terms ‘composing with electronics’, ‘electronic music’, and ‘electroacoustic composition’ interchangeably, while at other times noting that these terms inspire different definitions and aesthetic categories. In addition, I survey some the affordances that composing with electronics offers, such as control over sound morphography and spatialisation; the types of sounds employed and the traditions of making them, including sampling, processing, and synthesis; and the composers of this music and their musical histories. Finally, I briefly examine questions of whether new materials require new modes and means of composition, and whether the availability of electronic means have led to equality of access and representation within composition of this nature. This brief survey therefore also addresses what plurality within the history of electronic music has to contribute to the understanding of multiplicity in these musical practices today.

Definitions and Elements

To describe unifying elements in electronic music is almost an impossible task. Makis Solomos attempts to do something close to this in the book From Music to Sound, describing electronic means as a key component of what he identifies as ‘the emergence of sound in music’.¹ While his book is not focused on electronics, Solomos notes that in electroacoustic music – defined by Simon Emmerson and Dennis Smalley as ‘[m]usic in which electronic technology, now primarily computer-based, is used to access, generate, explore and configure sound materials, and in which loudspeakers are the prime medium of transmission’² – material is ‘sound and form, formal and narrative model, insignificant matter and mysterious sound body with multiple connotations’.³ Here, one might note the ways in which composing with electronics and composing with sounds (as opposed to notated pitches, or musical sounds that emanate from acoustic instruments) are often conflated. Solomos’s categories of sound practice, focused on timbre, noise, listening, immersion, composing sounds, and sound-space respectively,⁴ could similarly frame any discussion of composing with electronics, each of these categories offering multiple strategies for either analysing electronic works or for creating them.

Despite their focus on broad musical and/or sonic categories (and also being written nineteen years apart), the English-language translation and revision of Solomos’s book and Emmerson’s and Smalley’s review article hold in common something that is true of many histories and descriptions of electronic music practices: their examples are drawn from a canon of primarily white, Western, male composers with very little reference to the work of women, composers working outside of Western Europe and America, or work originating from outside of art music traditions, even when all of these are acknowledged to have influenced and cross-fertilised art musics that are made with electronics. As a result, it has become possible to describe ‘alternative’ histories of electronic music, this also becoming the title of a special issue of the journal Organised Sound. The editors of that issue, James Mooney, Dorien Schampaert and Tim Boon, articulate exactly this, noting in the academic history of electronic music ‘a reluctance to deviate from a handful of well-trodden narratives about electroacoustic music’s history that stem from the activities of a few “canonized” men (and, where applicable, their associated institutions)’.⁵ In their ‘alternative’ nature, these histories represent the ‘neglected, marginalised, or simply not considered’.⁶ These observations emphasise that even in the short period of the twentieth century, the inequalities that are observed elsewhere in music history have been preserved in the narrative and canonic histories of composing with electronics; in this discussion, on the other hand, those examples will be considered as the history of electronic music, before moving to the plurality of practices in the present day.

It is possible to begin with the deceptively simple question of the date of the creation of the first work of electronic music. The composer Jean-Claude Risset claimed that within Western music the seeds of concepts that are essential to computation can be found, writing that ‘the organ may be considered the first information machine: the performer, touching the keyboard, specifies information that is decoupled from the energy (provided by the pump) that actually produces the sound’.⁷ Even though most organs do today contain a circuit of some sort, one might struggle to accept a definition of electronic music that renders solo organ compositions as electronic works. The digital humanities project, 120 Years of Electronic Music brings together documentation of both successful and failed experiments in electrifying both music and instruments from (and in some cases before) 1880 to the present day,⁸ drawing together ‘instruments that generate sounds from a purely electronic source rather than electro-mechanically or electro-acoustically’.⁹ While neither of these categories suggests a specific work or its date as the birth of the composition of electronic musics, they do indicate that its principles draw on ideas, practices, and instrumental approaches that have been present in and have informed music-making long before the twentieth century.

Early Electronic Experiments

Many histories of composing with electronics cite the work of Pierre Schaeffer at Radiodiffusion Nationale in Paris. Schaeffer’s Cinq Études des Bruits (1948) can be considered the first and definitive statements of his method of musique concrète: composing using manipulated recordings of sounds on tape. In the case of Schaeffer’s works, these included recordings of trains, sounds from toys and objects, speech, percussion instruments, and other musical instruments such as the piano. Schaeffer used this process to find new and musical meanings in existing sounds, commenting that ‘during experiments, things begin to talk by themselves, as if they were bringing us messages from a world unknown to us.’¹⁰ Shortly after the composition of these works, in Cologne, Karlheinz Stockhausen is recorded as pioneering developments in Elektronische Musik: music created using wave oscillators as its primary material, resulting in compositions such as Studie I (1953) and Studie II (1954) which demonstrated the possibilities of sound synthesis within this method. However, when addressing Stockhausen’s own claims for the research that underpinned these compositions, Richard Toop found that not only does the often-quoted statement that Stockhausen began the research for these pieces in 1951 in the musique concrète studios in Paris not hold up to the composer’s own travel schedule, but that his correspondence with the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts demonstrates that he did not actually produce any electronic sound experiments at all until late in 1952, and remained unconvinced by them even into 1953, remarking of the early experimental efforts of others: ‘I don’t hear anything musically meaningful in them, but [they] indicate pathways … [though only] once one tries to hear just single sounds in isolation.’¹¹

Crucially, the emergence of fully electronic compositions in the twentieth century does not only hinge on pinning down the activities of such composers as Schaeffer and Stockhausen in the 1940s and 1950s. In 2007, Rob Young described the work of Halim El-Dabh in Egypt: in 1944, El-Dabh created a 25-minute composition – Ta’abir Al-Zaar (‘The Expression of ZaarI’) – from wire recordings manipulated at the Middle East Radio Studios.¹² The condition of the piece’s master tapes, along with the relatively little that was widely known of El-Dabh’s career – despite compositional acclaim that spanned Africa and the USA – were offered as reasons that this piece, now widely regarded as the ‘first’ work of electronic music, had been overlooked.¹³ El-Dabh’s composition meets the criteria for a ‘first’ electronic composition because the sounds of the piece were both recorded and manipulated electronically. That his project was motivated by curiosity both about sound and the possibilities of the technologies offered by radio studios demonstrates a parallel between the conditions in which this piece was made and the later compositions made in European studios. One may speculate whether or not the lack of recognition of El-Dabh’s work in the electronic music canon has to do with the characterisation of musical innovation – even within the sphere of electronic music and technology – as the purview of the ‘canonised’ men and their institutions identified by Mooney, et al. This same phenomenon can be found elsewhere in narratives to do with technology and is described by Anna Everett in the following way with regards to newer technologies as ‘primarily a racialised sphere of whiteness [that] inhere[s] in popular constructions of hi-tech and lo-to-no-tech spheres that too often consign black bodies to the latter, with the latter being insignificant if not absent altogether’.¹⁴ That is, El-Dabh’s composition is demonstrably a ‘first’ electronic composition by many possible definitions, but the composer himself and the circumstances of the piece’s composition do not fit with an overarching narrative of electronic music composition such that it continues to be overlooked.

Innovations: Mixed Media and New Instruments

A second question arises here around which composers made key innovations within the tradition of composing with electronics, and where and how they did so. Of course, those composers already mentioned are a part of this narrative, but one might also look to Edgard Varèse, whose Poème électronique (1958) was described by Lombardo et al. as ‘the first electroacoustic work in the history of music to be structurally integrated in an audiovisual context’.¹⁵ The original presentation of this piece combined a specially designed building – the Phillips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair – a spatialised array of loudspeakers, and film and visual effects designed by Le Corbusier and realised with the composer Iannis Xenakis, who was working with Le Corbusier at that time and also contributed an electronic piece to the event (Concret Ph (1958)). Poème électronique offers an obvious case study in the ways that innovations in electronic composition are often combined with those in other arts. The combination of possibilities in sound, spatialisation and visual presentation of art works make this piece a milestone in many aspects considered key to composing with electronics today: its potential to explore sound in space, its influence by and on other artistic disciplines, and its embrace of new technological means. The piece itself further demonstrates that these aspects of composition are not ones that necessarily become obsolete with the development of newer technologies; indeed the complexity present in the original staging of Poème électronique is such that even in 2009 a reconstruction of the work required the considerable efforts of a multidisciplinary team.¹⁶ This reconstruction further demonstrates the ongoing relevance of the questions of sound, space, and audio-visual relationships that are explored by Varèse in his work.

More than its individual innovations, Poème électronique might further demonstrate the link between compositional innovation with electronic means and innovation elsewhere in music. The composer Milton Babbitt – who himself became interested in electronics as a way to achieve precision beyond that achievable in instrumental music in the 1960s – suggested that in Varèse’s music more generally, ‘concern with and structural utilization of the timbral consequences of dynamic, registral, and durational values approach the condition of nonelectronic synthesis’.¹⁷ For Babbitt, Varèse’s electronic musical experiments should be considered symbiotic with his instrumental music, with innovation in the two going hand-in-hand. Presumably here, Babbitt was thinking of Varèse’s inclusion of early electronic instruments such as the ondes Martenot within his instrumental compositions. In the 1930s, Varèse was turned down for a Guggenheim fellowship for which he applied in 1932 in order to ‘pursue work on an instrument for the producing of new sounds’.¹⁸ This rejection clearly did not set his work back unduly, since in 1934 he composed Ecuatorial, a piece for which the Russian inventor Leon Theremin created two instruments to Varèse’s specifications.¹⁹ However, it is this kind of compositional activity, where what can be achieved with electronic means influences the development of the sonic means of music more generally, to which Babbitt referred. Morris claims that in Babbitt’s approach to electronic composition ‘the hierarchy of musical attributes had to be reflected in the medium’s technical implementation’,²⁰ and one can surmise that these electronic innovations followed those musical innovations necessitated by the music of the early twentieth century, whether or not produced through electronic means, and were therefore – in a sense – inherently modernist.

The Radiophonic Studio

Further examples of innovation in the use of electronic instruments and means to develop compositional approaches may be found in comparable work undertaken around the same period by other composers. Many advancements are also evident in the work of female composers, often in electronic studios connected to radio stations and universities. While involved in many of the same technological advances as their male counterparts – working in similar ways and with similar equipment – these artists often found themselves working in circumstances that declined them recognition as composers.²¹ A now relatively well-known example is the composer Delia Derbyshire, who created the theme music to the BBC sci-fi drama Doctor Who in 1963 from an idea created by Ron Grainer, but was not credited for many years. Theresa Winter speculates that ‘Derbyshire was probably very pleased to have been given a relatively large amount of creative freedom because of her artistic aspirations’,²² and David Butler suggests that the general anonymity in which the Radiophonic Studio was held at the time was at fault for the lack of credit received, writing that ‘[Grainer] was delighted with Derbyshire’s contribution and sought, unsuccessfully for her, a share of the credit and royalties, but he was overruled.’²³ However, Winter also suggests that the popularity of the Doctor Who theme ‘overshadowed the diversity of [the Radiophonic Studio’s] work’.²⁴

Derbyshire’s predecessor at the Radiophonic Studio and its founder, Daphne Oram, is herself a key example of the diversity of that work. Her innovations in the composition of electronic music spanned electronic instrument design, sound morphology and the integration of electronic sound into orchestral composition. Ten years ahead of the publication of Babbitt’s statement quoted above, Oram suggested a similar desire for technological means to follow and facilitate compositional necessity. In 1956 she wrote to the BBC, arguing for the creation of the Radiophonic Studio, ‘[o]nce the composer can write without the limitations of performance his palette is extended enormously … rhythms become anything the composer can visualise without them having to be playable. Timbres have no registration and theoretically any sound, musical or otherwise, is within his grasp.’²⁵ Examples of the diversity of her work in achieving this extension of compositional palette can be found in the electronic instrument she designed – the Oramics machine – that realised sound from graphic notations produced by the composer, but also in her notated compositions that sought to harness electronic means in an instrumental context far earlier than other composers who went on to do the same. Richards gives a detailed description of how the Oramics machine worked in terms of its electronic processes and build,²⁶ and claims that even though competing patents existed for other instruments and machines that displayed similarities to Oram’s, ‘her method for the digital optoelectronic control of pitch over time, developed with Graham Wrench, is very likely to have been a technological first’.²⁷

Even before the development of the Oramics machine, Oram was considering electronic means within large-scale musical composition. Her composition Still Point (1948–9) combined electronic sound processes within the orchestra. Like Poème électronique, this piece was recently reconstructed, although in this case for its world premiere. In 2018, composer James Bulley and turntablist Shiva Fesharecki realised the piece from score fragments and instructions within the Daphne Oram archive, working with electronic instruments and processes authentic to the time of composition. Bulley writes of this process that ‘early experiences using turntables and mixing sound in the complex acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall inspired Oram to explore the spatial and acoustic aspects of orchestral composition, harnessing the newfound potential for live manipulation of amplified sound in performance.’²⁸ The realisation was presented at the BBC Proms in 2018 – seventy years after the piece’s composition – in a programme titled ‘Pioneers of Sound’, highlighting Oram’s work alongside that of Derbyshire, Laurie Spiegel and Suzanne Ciani. While this prom demonstrates a mainstream revival of the ‘alternative’ history and tradition of electronic music that can be found in the music of these composers, one might note the need for such revival when the BBC had presented their first Proms programme featuring electronic music (the UK premiere of Perspectives (1957) by Luciano Berio) in August 1960.

This history of electronic music then is also one of discovery and rediscovery. Winter suggests that ‘the history of the medium is a relatively fluid field of knowledge’, and that its expansion is driven by ‘people normally considered to be on the fringes of mainstream histories of electronic music’.²⁹ On one hand, the examples described here imply some sort of egalitarianism in the history of composing with electronics. Far from the purview of only white men, this creative discipline found a first instance in Africa, and some of its notable innovations came about in institutions outside of the musical mainstream, from the work of women composers. On the other hand, that these musical examples from the relatively recent past require ‘revival’ may lead one to ask how many times such composers and their music must be ‘revived’ and rediscovered for their contributions to be remembered, and to what extent this reflects the nature of the overarching mainstream narratives of music in this medium. While such non-canonic examples may not demonstrate barriers to entry in electronic music, they do demonstrate barriers after entry in the recognition of the musical contributions of all composers, comparable to those found elsewhere in musical history and practice.

Contemporary Examples

It is not possible to provide here an overview of all histories, cultures, and strategies for composition found in electronic music, but it is possible to link some of these aspects of the culture of composing with electronics in the mid-twentieth century to that of some composers working today. This is now explored through three examples of composers working with a variety of concepts, technological means, and aesthetic ideas: Lauren Sarah Hayes, Khyam Allami, and Moor Mother, who represent a variety of approaches to composing with electronics. Of obvious importance to these examples is also the speed with which the available technologies and approaches advance – including the use of the internet, which has facilitated certain aspects of their practice. However, while these composers can be noted as abreast of such advances, an overview of the technologies available to them today will quickly become out of date and will not adequately explain the innovations of their work. These examples are therefore presented as being of interest not because they sit at the cutting edge of technological development but rather because their myriad aesthetic approaches align with some of the principles of electronic music that I have already outlined: in performance, the creation of sounds, and its relationship with other musical disciplines.

Listening List

https://shorturl.at/dqFW8

Being creative is about making the right choices to make something original. Time and time again when composers find the systems from which they draw inspirations are no longer fertile grounds for ideas, they begin to look elsewhere for new concepts, new stimuli, and new ways of thinking. The sources of these ideas might originate in a society or community other than the one to which the composer belongs; in other words, traditions of a different culture. The impact and quality of each of these transcultural compositional exercises varies depending on the composer’s motivation and understanding of the principles involved. Equally, their strategy, choice of materials, craftsmanship and sense of invention are crucial. This chapter provides an overview of transcultural composing – with a particular focus on motivation behind this practice – and offers a detailed investigation of a work of mine as an example to illustrate the process.

The Embodiment of Culture Through Music

Culture is ‘a historically created system of meaning and significance … a system of beliefs and practices in terms of which a group of human beings understand, regulate and structure their individual and collective lives’.¹ It is articulated at different levels. At the most basic of these levels, it is reflected in language – the way its syntax, grammar, and vocabulary are used to describe the world. Societies with similar languages share at least some cultural features. Likewise, cultures with similar frameworks of musical conception share a higher degree of mutual understanding and appreciation. Fundamentally, a piece of music is a sequence of sonic events taking place within a pre-determined timeframe. Sounds are abstract and do not carry meaning intrinsically – they are mere vibrations in the air received by our ears, interpreted by our brains and then given meanings. Sounds are moulded by composers and musicians into repeatable, recognisable patterns. The sequences of pitches with their defined durational proportion (i.e. motifs, themes, melodies) and collections of simultaneous pitches (i.e. harmonies, timbres) are mingled with a network of opinions, attitudes, and thoughts. These have geographical, social, political or even racial associations as we receive them. Over time, these meanings, or interpretations, are shared, collected, developed, categorised, and canonised into ‘traditions’ which are ‘transmitted across generations to form a context that then becomes a framework for subsequent cultural activity and interpretation’.²

The perception of traditions are as ‘dialectical and ambivalent as any concept that demands, and allows for, interpretation; for such interpretation may start at different and possibly opposite points of departure’. Ernst Krenek continues, ‘these in turn depend on the system of values chosen by the respective observers so that the term “tradition” will take on positive or negative shadings’.³ Therefore a single sonic element can be perceived to have different meanings by people upholding different ‘systems of values’. Understanding the constitution of cultures and the implication of different perceptions of a tradition enables composers to weave a ‘web of allusion to certain non-musical sources which enhances the essentially abstract nature of the musical material itself’.⁴ As music’s association with a culture depends on the interpretation of the sounds received by the listener, the success of a ‘cultural allusion’ relies on the receiver’s pre-conception and familiarity with the tradition or traditions referred to, as well as when and how the allusion is presented in context of the totality of a piece of work. The impression of the intended allusion varies greatly among those who hear it. That can also depend on if it is parody, tribute, commentary or conceptual reference. Therefore, to engineer better resultant reception, composers are required to have a good understanding of the elements and cultural associations that come with the materials they employ, and how they can be manipulated.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the definition of musical tradition has become increasingly complex. With advances in communications accelerating the flow of knowledge around the world, cultural exchange and amalgamation has become a common occurrence. To what degree is a composer influenced by each of the different ‘systems of values’ that they encountered? Especially in such an increasingly complex matrix of cultural cross-current where boundaries of these ‘systems of values’ are constantly shifting. This is a question worth asking. At one end of the spectrum, some composers feel they are strongly associated with a specific culture. At the other, some composers do not find themselves belonging to any particular well-defined musical culture. They carry a sense of rootlessness. Consciously or not, the intention, degree, strategy and usage of materials in transcultural composing differs from case to case. It depends on an awareness of heritage, artistic inclination and imagination.

Identity and Belonging: A Matter of Fitting In

Many musicians start learning music the Western way. They contextualise music based on the well-tempered tuning system which allows music to be played in all major or minor heptatonic keys without sounding perceptibly ‘out of tune’. This system provides the foundation for many concepts in Western music, and it has been used across Europe as the musical lingua franca since the seventeenth century. With the ‘Age of Exploration’ and subsequent colonisation, Western music was introduced to colonies through the work of missionaries and an educational system modelled on Western society. Western music was systematically prioritised in the ‘new world’. Indigenous music was often branded primitive and deemed unworthy of study.

These examples of ‘psychological structures of self-hatred’,⁵ combined with the inherited hierarchical structures of domination in some post-colonial or post-assimilated countries, catalysed the indigenisation of Western culture in Asian countries. ‘Western art music has been legitimized through governmental and/or institutional practice, radically redefining the social function of art music and concept of musical authorship in the process’.⁶ Over time, these structured inequalities in cultures became implicit and embedded in the social thinking. This power structure creates a dilemma for composers who readily identify with a tradition outside the dominant, but whose acquired compositional vocabulary is heavily derived from the ‘mainstream’. Their ties with the dominant culture systemically lead them to contextualise other cultures using attributes developed for the dominant one. More problematically, these hegemonic points of view often lead to devaluation of other cultures because of different perceptions of priorities.

The feeling of not belonging has been articulated, often with a feeling of uneasiness, by many twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers. Particularly so for those who are not of Western European origin. For example, Béla Bartók felt anxiety that was deepened by the double bind of being Hungarian and aspiring to success abroad. While for Arnold Schoenberg ‘identifying his German precursors as models supposedly guaranteed that the path he had taken was justified by music history itself, for Bartók invoking his Hungarian musical heritage would only have served to provincialize him as an exotic “other”. For Schoenberg choosing his models from German music history was an act of pride. For Bartók, who had to position himself not only as an innovator but also as an artist securely rooted both in national and Western European traditions, it was an agonizing, difficult process’.⁷

In creating music that was Hungarian in character and yet new in tone, Bartók could only make use of the musical heritage which was available to him. However, his Hungarian heritage consisted of ‘nineteenth-century romantic music, the pseudo-folksongs and verbunkos music’, while the modern means of expression consisted of ‘the music of [Richard] Strauss and the development of nineteenth-century German music’. Therefore, he could not avoid the crisis resulting from the ‘contradictory and incongruous nature of two elements’.⁸ Bartók’s integration of folk music into art music was essential in his composing career as it ‘could be considered both modernist innovation and national loyalty’.⁹ This was a creative decision which can be viewed as an act of patriotic duty as much as a necessary step in his career as a composer. With such clean-cut division between vernacular folk music and sophisticated art music, do we run the risk of simplifying the issue? Do we simply identify the degree of influence of different cultures on an individual, or even simplify the notion of the composer’s own perception of belonging? By classifying the music of Hungary as nationalist, as ‘an alternative to “universality”, the prerogative of the “central” musical nations [Germany, France, and Italy]’,¹⁰ we automatically relegate Hungary to ‘peripheral’ status.

Igor Stravinsky is another composer whose works are strongly coloured by his attitude towards tradition and belonging. ‘Russianness’ is core to the success of his early works. By the end of the 1910s, Stravinsky felt the need to move away from the influence of his home country. He started drawing inspiration from the more mainstream Western European music. While he saw music from the Baroque and Classical periods as a way of progressing creatively, his view of his Russian roots was becoming detached. In his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1939–40), he gave a unique view on ‘Russianness’:

But as Stephen Walsh suggests, Stravinsky’s comment has to be read in the context of his contemporaneous works, and in the context of what was still vulgarly understood as ‘Russian’.¹² Such a repositioning of cultural belonging was a crucial element to Stravinsky’s unlocking of creative resources, which could otherwise be unavailable, or considered ‘illegitimate’ for him. Echoing the title of one of his most stylistically eclectic works, Agon (‘Game’ or ‘Contest’) (1957), Stravinsky has described his approach to musical composition as a ‘game’.¹³ This analogy provides a useful insight into the way Stravinsky perceived his cultural belonging. Both game and tradition are fundamentally the products of execution of a pre-determined set of rules. By considering composition as a game, Stravinsky implied the possibilities of altering his own tradition as well as constructing new ones in order to stay fashionable and creditable. He demonstrated a similar creative manoeuvre in his shift from neo-classicism to serialism later on in life. It seems then, that Stravinsky considered these various traditions as ‘games’ to be adopted and discarded, each with its own set of rules open to constant re-interpretations.

Both Bartók and Stravinsky came from the ‘provincialised Europe’.¹⁴ The anxiety of not fitting into the mainstream must have been felt by them – at least at the beginning of their careers. In order to transcend the periphery to fit into the dominant culture, it would have been necessary for them to navigate between their own ‘natural’ national musical heritages and the Western European musical framework. They both created works which combined Western European music with the more orally transmitted ‘natural’ musical heritages of their home countries. This gives their works an air of the exotic, a kind of ‘nationalized exoticism’.¹⁵

Exoticism and Orientalism

Globalisation has had a major impact on music and its dissemination. In the early twentieth century when atonality was becoming a new wave in composition, jazz and non-Western musics were also being introduced to Western European and American societies. These fresh sounds were extremely attractive to composers, some of whom had indirect contact with agents of these ‘other’ musics, such as Puccini researching the music of Japan for Madam Butterfly (1904) via publications containing transcriptions of Japanese songs. On the other hand, there were composers who had more direct contact with ‘exotic’ cultures. Examples such as Louis Moreau Gottschalk in Central and South America, Albert Roussel in Southeast Asia and India and Debussy’s encounter with Balinese gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. From these experiences they drew elements of these cultures into their own works. Even though each of these experiences resulted in some fine early examples of transcultural composition, the transactions were uni-directional in the absorption of influence. They embedded materials from the ‘other’ cultures in a canvas belonging primarily to the dominant culture. However, as the cultural climate has changed over the years, these composers’ intentions are now often interpreted as cultural appreciation at best, and in some cases, cultural appropriation.

Since the 1950s, billions of people have become exposed to cultures previously unfamiliar to them. Music of the industrialised West has exerted a vast impact on most of the world’s music. As Bruno Nettl summarises:

Although Nettl sympathetically emphasises the bi-directional nature of transcultural influence or confluence between Western and non-Western societies, he does not deny the centrality of Western music in the global musical landscape. This echoes an observation Canadian composer Claude Vivier made in 1977 that:

The Chinese composer Chou Wen-chung highlights this issue from the point of view of a ‘minority’:

Of course, no assumption can be made of the background of Chinese composers as it ‘much depends on when they were born, where they spent their childhood or formative years, where they were educated and where they now live’.¹⁹ One of the more general issues highlighted by Chou was the ignorance of Chinese theory by the Chinese themselves. This problem is echoed by Tōru Takemitsu:

During his study at New England Conservatory between 1946 and 1950, Chou Wen-chung absorbed a huge amount in terms of compositional techniques. He acquired familiarity with major contemporary works. However, the incompatibility of his choice of thematic materials with the technique he employed, his ‘blending of Chinese melody and Western harmony’ was finally put into question by his teacher Bohuslav Martinů. This problem was further highlighted when Nicolas Slonimsky challenged Chou’s knowledge about traditional Chinese music, which made ‘Chou [feel] embarrassed because actually he knew very little’.²¹ Motivated by a keen sense of embarrassment, Chou devoted himself between 1955 and 1957 to the study of the literature, notation, historical background, and playing technique of the traditional Chinese qin (seven-string zither). At the same time, he began to formulate how he was going to develop his own style. He combined his study of Chinese painting, calligraphy, poetry, and philosophy with his study of Western music history, and developed a comparative perspective in his conceptualisation of the ‘difference between some of the general aesthetic values of Western and Chinese arts and music’²² (Table 15.1).

What he started off as a comparative approach to conceptualise the differences between Western and Chinese aesthetics led him to develop the conviction of a ‘re-merger’ of Eastern and Western musical concepts and practices. He believes ‘the traditions of Eastern and Western music once shared the same sources and that, after a thousand years of divergence, they are now merging to form the mainstream of a new musical tradition’.²³ This newly established concept, combined with ‘a desire to succeed as a composer in the West’,²⁴ provided a foundation for Chou to filter through the classical Chinese materials. He fused them with Western techniques to develop new compositional concepts such as cultural confluence and the development of his I-Ching-inspired ‘variable modes’.

A similar journey was experienced by Filipino composer and ethnomusicologist José Maceda. Starting his musical career as a concert pianist, Maceda later turned to historical musicology and eventually composition. In 1947, during the preparation for a series of recitals featuring Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata in Manila, he was ‘repeatedly provoked by an interior voice posing what was for him an epiphany and a previously unasked question, “What has all of this got to do with coconuts and rice?”’²⁵ As Maceda later recalled, there was a notable absence of pre-colonial music, implicitly symbolised by ‘coconuts and rice’, in the culture with which he grew up. This was particularly so under American occupation and in a middle-class community. The European tonality, as Michael Tenzer pointed out, was rooted deeply in Manila’s artistic circles, which ‘inculcated inspiring musicians with a sense of the inexorable authority of European tonality, and fed the tenacious illusion that there was nothing else musically Philippine [sic] to discover’.²⁶

Maceda’s awakening came with two very different musical encounters. First, in the late 1940s, he was introduced to the music of Edgard Varèse, who pioneered the concept of ‘sound-masses’ and their interactions, and later, Iannis Xenakis. Maceda saw the works of Varèse and Xenakis as efforts in attaining ‘a higher form of universality than Western music had achieved through tonality and its putative heir, serialism’.²⁷ Maceda’s second revelation came on his return to the Philippines in 1952, when he encountered the sound of the kinaban, the Hanunoo jaw’s harp of Mindoro island. This led him to study ethnomusicology at UCLA, followed by ethnomusicological research in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. It was through this work that he discovered:

From his research, Maceda came to appreciate certain features in Asian native cultural concepts such as drones, infinity (‘repeated sounds, with no stressed, showing a concept of time without marking time, like a straight line with no end’²⁹), balance with nature and emphasis on timbre rather than melody – all of which he came to explore in his compositions. Works such as Ugma-ugma (1963), Pagsamba (1968), Ugnayan (1974), and Udlot-udlot (1975) are ritualistic and scored for a large number of performers. For example, a performance of Ugnayan would involve twenty pre-recorded tracks being broadcast on twenty (or its multiple) radio stations (Example 15.1). Thousands of people are encouraged to move freely in open spaces, each carrying a radio receiver randomly tuned to one of the radio stations, creating an organic sound-mass which engulfs the listeners. Maceda interrogated musical structures and their distinct relationship to Asian cultural and social thoughts. He explored the connection between ‘a past doctrine of civilization and a contemporary mode of behaviour and creative imagination that have been moulded by centuries of change that now intervene between the ancient “past” and a dynamic “present”’.³⁰ In doing so, Maceda defined his identity as a non-Westerner, as an Asian and as a Filipino. Through a thorough examination of his various traditions, he found ‘alternatives to the imposed values of imperialist and dominant cultures, offering paradigms in the exercise of freedom, imagination, and humanism’.³¹

Example 15.1 José Maceda, Ugnayan (1974), ending.

Reproduced by permission of University of the Philippines Center for Ethnomusicology.

Constructing an Imaginary Culture

The result of any amalgamation is the formation of something new. When combining elements from two or more cultures in a composition, the result, strictly speaking, is only related to the original cultures. It belongs to a synthetic culture, a culture dreamt up by its creator. As Hungarians, for example, Bartók and György Ligeti share much of the same cultural heritage. Yet living through the Second World War and the Cold War, the creative decisions faced by Ligeti were more complex. By 1971, he already felt a looming creative crisis, both for him and other post-war composers. As he reminisced in 1981:

Ligeti did not find his way out of this stylistic crisis until he came to write his Horn Trio of 1982. Nonetheless, in his magnum opus Le Grand Macabre (1974–7, rev. 1996), he had already started a lengthy investigation and self-examination. It is a work full of sonic inventions as well as pseudo-pastiches and allusions to older musics, most famously so in its final passacaglia, parodying Beethoven’s passacaglia theme in the finale of the Eroica symphony. Although the main purpose of Le Grand Macabre is its response to the operatic genre, its quality of ‘examining the past’ – specifically Ligeti’s peripherally European past – places it as ‘the most apt musical symbol for the new space that Hungary came to take in Ligeti’s work’.³³ Referring to an article titled Musical Memories of My Childhood written by Ligeti, Rachel Beckles Willson argued that one crucial factor of Ligeti’s success in creating a strange and intriguing past was the inaccessibility of his origins. Without the constraint of facts, due to a lack of surviving documentation, Ligeti had the freedom to inject elements of fantasy into the construction of his past and the ‘musical history’ of an ‘imagined’ Hungary according to his ‘memories’. Ligeti’s Hungary ‘was essentially something that he elaborated for the purposes of his career in the West, a considerable part of it was tinged with fantasy’.³⁴ In constructing an imaginary country with ‘imagined traditions’, Ligeti realised the importance of artificial semiotics based on ‘reality’ to increase the credibility of such a make-believe location.

This strategy of drawing imagined traditions from a make-believe place based on familiar attributes, where the ‘real’ melts into the ‘imaginary’ (and vice versa) resonates with the literary movement known as magical realism. This genre is associated with a select group of Latin-American writers including Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. They experienced themselves as lacking (in their case as a result of poverty and economic exile) a cultural tradition in which to ground their creativity. It is with the term ‘magical realism’ (or ‘réalisme magique’) that the Canadian composer Denys Bouliane, a student of Ligeti, identified himself earlier on in his career. For his cycle of works under the collective title Gamache – Rythmes et échos des rivages anticostiens (2009), Vols et vertiges du Gamache (2008–10), Tekeni-Ahsen (2010–11) and Kahseta’s tekeni-ahsen (2010–11) – Bouliane draws inspiration from an invented community living on the Anticosti Island in Quebec. It has its own history, culture, language, custom and music. This technique was one of the many solutions Bouliane came up with as ‘a need to situate oneself, to forcefully or clumsily verify the state of the presence of one’s roots’.³⁵

Bouliane later recalled that, as a student in the 1970s, the Montréal music scene was saturated with the music of post-serialism, represented by composers such as Serge Garant and the post-Messaien school with Gilles Tremblay as a leading figure. Bouliane did not feel he belonged to either school, and had been looking elsewhere for role models. When he first heard Le Grand Macabre, he was completely transfixed. It is not hard to imagine the attraction Le Grand Macabre had for a young composer like Bouliane, who did not feel a sense of belonging to any school. The idea of ‘imagined tradition’ that Ligeti explored in his ‘anti-anti-opera’ struck a chord in Bouliane, who had already concerned himself with the issue of tradition. For the young Canadian composer:

Bouliane came to the conclusion that ‘all that I can do is to play with tradition, to become an illusionist, to make believe I do have a culture, to invent a pseudo-tradition, in sum to play the part of the chameleon’.³⁷ For the purpose of inventing a ‘reality’ by playing with traditions, Bouliane developed a system of ‘extended modes’ based on diatonic modes, which are colourfully explored in works such as Jeux de société (1979–80, revised 1981), A Certain Chinese Cyclopaedia (1986), Douze Tiroirs de demi-vérités pour alléger votre descente (1981–2) and Le Cactus rieur et la demoiselle qui souffrait d’une soif insatiable (1986). This invented system of organising musical attributes enabled him to build harmonies with various degrees of diatonic implications. He often alluded to existing musical syntaxes – such as diatonic chords – with unexpected resolutions, or what he called ‘pseudo-functional tonality’.³⁸ More importantly, all these harmonic materials have traceable links to a pre-defined, artificial modal-framework (echoing Chou Wen-chung’s variable modes). In doing so, the ‘notion of a tradition’ is embedded in a system with a logical paradigm that governs the basic palette of the music, just as major and minor scales have functioned in Western music.

The Giant Web Metaphor of Culture

One idea Ligeti suggested during his Hamburg composition classes left a lasting impact on Bouliane. The ‘oscillatory theory of culture’:

Compared to Krenek’s concept of tradition as a ‘system of value’, Ligeti’s metaphor is more useful for visualising the complex nature of multiple influences. The default position of a composer in the ‘giant web’ is determined by their experiences. Every source of influence is placed in a ‘relative position’ according to chronological, geographical, social, and other factors. Each source has its own magnitude of oscillation. The bigger the influence, the larger the wave it creates. The person will pick up each of these influences according to their relative distance from these sources as well as the power of the wave. However, they are free to choose their position with respect to all sources of influence according to individual artistic conviction. This adjustment of position in the web, in order to engineer the overall magnitude of combined influences, is the exact metaphor for transcultural composing. With this concept, composers can put themselves into a more comprehensive, multi-dimensional perspective. Hence they can create a more realistic mental model for the purpose of filtering and amalgamating elements from different cultures. Each composer also has the potential to invent a tradition if their creation has the gravitas to influence others. One thing is certain: no one exists in a cultural vacuum.

A Personal Example: Composing Jieshi

In 2011, I had an opportunity to explore an Asian tradition which I have not experienced growing up in British Colonial Hong Kong. Jieshi was written for qin, the Chinese seven-string zither, and a Western string quartet. It was based on the ancient qin melody Youlan. Youlan, or Jieshi Diao Youlan in full meaning ‘Secluded Orchid in Stone Tablet Mode’, is believed to be the oldest surviving notated music from the Far East, dating back to the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD). Although I am ethnically Chinese, I had minimal exposure to qin music when I was growing up in Hong Kong. After discovering the story of Chou Wen-chung being challenged by Nicolas Slonimsky about his relationship with traditional Chinese music, I started thinking critically about my own relationship with it. Even though I share Chou’s sentiment, I did not have the time available to immerse myself into the study of qin playing. I used Stravinsky’s attitude towards Russian music as a point of departure, viewing Chinese music from ‘a vantage point’, with an observational, objective approach.

Youlan has been used in compositions by Chinese composers, most notably in Tan Dun’s first string quartet Feng-Ya-Song (1982) and the second movement titled Secluded Orchid of Zhou Long’s Rites of Chimes (2000). I was fully aware of my lack of in-depth knowledge of qin music and the philosophy behind its playing. Therefore I did not feel it appropriate to dismantle a cultural artefact such as Youlan and reconstitute it into a fantasy or theme-and-variations type composition. In my mind, the historical and cultural background of the raw material demanded to be treated with respect. Since I knew qin music only from a distance, I decided my compositional approach was to be as objective as possible. I wanted to write a work that could highlight the unique history of Youlan, the performance philosophy of qin music, and most of all, the expertise of the player.

My solution was conceptually simple. With Li Xiangting, a professor at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, who is also one of the finest qin players in the world, as a consultant and the soloist in the first performance, I set out to make Jieshi a showcase of the quality of authentic qin playing. I requested him to interpret Youlan as naturally as possible. Meanwhile, for the string quartet parts, I wanted the materials to be derived entirely from the original qin melody, non-intrusively. I drew this idea from the art of framing paintings, where the colour, dimension and decorations are carefully considered in order to strike a balance between contrast and harmony. Jieshi was to be a composition-as-observation. Once this idea was formed, I started to think about generating material for the string quartet. Qin, originally a ‘ritual instrument’, later became a ‘personal, intimate instrument because of its limited volume and intricate sound quality’.⁴⁰ With that in mind, the choice of deploying a heavily muted Western string quartet throughout to complement the timbre of the qin seemed a natural option. I had been given a transcription – in Western notations – of Youlan by Master Li (Figure 15.1). I also had a commercial recording, played by him⁴¹.

Figure 15.1 Excerpt of Youlan transcription by Master Li Xiangting.

Reproduced with permission.

In Master Li’s transcription, the melody is notated in Western music fashion. However, invented symbols made up of re-combined fragmented Chinese characters used by qin players to codify fingering techniques are placed below individual notes. All authentic qin music is largely improvisatory in nature. Youlan is no exception. A quick glance of Master Li’s transcription would present a false impression as the appearance of Western notion implies a degree of accuracy in duration proportion, for example, a crotchet is equal to two quavers, and so on. It was therefore essential for me to remind myself that the original ‘manuscript’ was written in Chinese characters, or ideograms (Figure 15.2). These ideograms describe the finger positions, fingering technique, character of the sound and duration in often poetic and mystic terms. ‘Great emphasis [is] placed on the production and control of tone, which often involves an elaborated vocabulary of articulations, modification in timbre, inflections in pitch, fluctuation in intensity, vibratos and tremolos.’⁴² Nothing was absolute, and yet everything is carefully detailed.

Figure 15.2 Manuscript of Youlan from the early Tang Dynasty (c. seventh century).

Reproduced by permission of the Digital Research Archives, Tokyo National Museum.

Just as important as the tone of words is in a tonal language like Chinese, this focus on tonal colour in qin music⁴³ resonates with the thinking of composers from the Spectralism school. The timbre and decay of sounds form an integral part of their philosophy. In order to explore the potential of qin’s timbre, I carried out a spectral analysis on Master Li’s recording of Youlan to get a better picture of the harmonic composites of the sound made by this instrument. Through this exercise, I discovered that the sound of the qin is rich in upper harmonics:

This rich palette of upper harmonics, not particularly noticeable when heard, provided me with a repertoire of pitch materials, or ‘harmonic stacks’, for the string quartet (Figure 15.3). With the modal nature of Youlan, a limited set of notes is repeatedly played. Over time, a virtual sustained harmonic background – or drone as Maceda would have described it – is created with an emphasis on certain pitches. Using the string quartet to sustain these pitches as well as their associated upper harmonics is a way of metaphorically amplifying and delaying the decays of sounds of the qin.

Figure 15.3 Youlan’s upper partials (‘harmonic stacks’) obtained from spectral analysis in relation to the original.’

The decision of retaining the improvisatory character of Youlan in Jieshi prompted a notational challenge. In the original of Master Li’s transcription, the music is notated in Western notation. Although bar lines are used, Master Li explained that the music is not supposed to be played with any sense of strict meter. Therefore, this transcription is to be interpreted as a guideline for improvisation. At best, the qin player would play all the notes written out, with a large degree of flexibility regarding the duration of the notes. This operation is in some ways not dissimilar to jazz music where players improvise around a melody. To facilitate this notion of elasticity of the music, an unorthodox system of notation was required to co-ordinate the solo qin with the four Western string players. It was based on the principle that the qin player is the leader, a conductor of sorts. The string quartet players follow, or more appropriately, ‘comment’ on the music played by the qin player. The four string parts are for most of the time tied in with the qin part and operate mostly independently from each other (Example 15.2). There are also moments when the string players synchronise with each other to create a more unified sonic texture (Example 15.3).

Example 15.2 Raymond Yiu, Jieshi (2011), fig. F, string players operating according to the qin part, independently from each other.

Example 15.3 Jieshi, before fig. N, string players operating in synchronisation.

Another aspect of the materials derived for the string quartet is the way the players mimic the musical gestures of the qin (Example 15.4). Besides the rich timbral variety, another distinctive feature of qin playing is the repertoire of fingering techniques – different in each hand. In qin manuals such as Shen Ch’i Pi P’u (1425, edited by Chu Ch’üan) and San Ts’ai T’u Hui (1607/09, edited by Wang Ch’i), there are numerous fingering techniques listed. They include a wide range of techniques such as single or double notes, type of slide, pitch deviations, angle, and types of attack. To gain an in-depth understanding of these techniques takes years of study. The most sensible solution was to relate all the materials for the string quartet as closely to the original qin melody without any unjustifiable creative imposition.

In Jieshi, the use of Western string instruments is taken out of its normal cultural context. Here, the strings function purely as sound generators capable of producing quiet, sustained pitches. Their ‘emotional quality’, namely the use of vibrato, often associated with Western music, is suppressed. With the unusual notational concept, the performers are required to listen more intensely than they usually do in metered Western classical music.

Example 15.4 Jieshi, before fig. C, string players mimicking solo qin gesture.

The other issue I faced when working on Jieshi was the question of authorship. For a composer such as myself, who grew up in a Westernised Chinese society, the absence of ‘a composer’ for a musical work seemed unorthodox. With that in mind, approaching Youlan from a composer-as-observer angle was possibly the most appropriate strategy. It was essential for me to find a suitable point in the ‘Giant Web’ for this particular work so that all cultural influences involved are proportionally weighted. The choices of materials and their treatments are informed by a combination of historical, cultural, dramatic, and aesthetic context. I saw Youlan as a cultural artefact, which demanded a non-destructive treatment from the start. It was a decision influenced by my respect for a field of knowledge which I was still to explore, and yet, felt comfortable enough to engage with in a non-deconstructive way.

Conclusion

Transcultural composing can range from mere quotation to an elaborate system of harmonic and/or rhythmic organisation inspired by a different culture. The possibilities and variations are numerous. To engage in transcultural composing is not necessarily something every composer consciously does: there are composers who happily compose music using ideas and techniques which they have acquired within the ‘dominant’ Western musical system. There are other composers who have discovered ideas from ‘other’ cultures which inspire them superficially. They may not appreciate the impact of the cultural hybridity they have produced beyond the sonic surface. Then, there are composers who are heritage conscious. They are more likely to pay attention to the histories of the multiple cultures from which they draw inspiration, the processes through which they manipulate materials and the cultural implications. I believe compositions from the last category are likely to be more thoughtful and persuasive.

Many of the composers engaged in meaningful transcultural composing went beyond decorative borrowing and embedding of non-Western musical materials into Western structural framework, or ‘the practice of composing for Western contexts’.⁴⁴ They carried out thorough investigations of their heritages to understand the constitution and dynamics of their cultural belonging and creative identity. These cultural brokers – ‘individuals who have acquired understanding of more than one set of cultural principles and who function as mediators between native and foreign cultural groups in initiating dialogues’⁴⁵ – make informed choices in the strategies and materials for their works. They usually have greater command and knowledge of specific musical practices other than the Western ‘dominant’ tradition. Refinement in their compositional procedures is also required for more successful integration of cultural resources.

Ideally, composers should adopt the ethnomusicological perspective, a set of shared attitudes on how one construes music-making in and out of culture. It consists of three components – to consider there is more than one kind of legitimate art music, to allow someone else’s contrasting musical practice to be considered as valid and worthwhile, and to view the various musics of the past that are not part of one’s actual or adopted tradition so they can be respected and enjoyed. However, the most important factor shared by successful transcultural composers, through my research and my own compositional practice, is finding the right motivation for doing so. These motivations can range from positioning oneself culturally (using models such as Ligeti’s ‘Giant Web’ metaphor, for example) to investigating the essence of a culture outside the ‘dominant’ Western one. It can be exploring the confluences between cultures, universality towards a kind of ‘cultural transcendence’,⁴⁶ or inventing an ‘imaginary culture’ by playing with traditions.

In an age when we are striving for more equality under the shadow of the ‘colonially tainted’, Western-centric musical history, it is important for all composers to examine their culture holistically. We need to understand our cultural make-up to find the most suitable ways to handle transcultural operation. To look at transcultural composing at a more analytical level helps composers from the ‘dominant’ culture to avoid unintentional cultural appropriation. Composers from ‘other’ cultures can find a better understanding of their own cultural identity, and hence locate their heritage more easily. This will help them to develop their works with an evolved sense of individuality that reflects their experiences in more truthful and unique ways.

Listening List

https://shorturl.at/almFZ

Adaptation is at the heart of many things a composer does, whether that be the stylistic pastiche studies they might undertake as a student, the arrangements and orchestrations they might make of their own (or others’) works, or the reimagining and staging of literature and other artworks for the concert hall, stage or screen.

Literary theorist Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as both process and product:

• An acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works

• A creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging

• An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work¹

This ‘double definition’ of adaptation (as process, as product) reflects composers’ reality as pragmatic practitioners. Hutcheon offers a helpful way past restrictive discussions of fidelity that plague adaptations from conception to reception. Often such discussions focus on adaptations from novels into something else, with a lot of complaining about how much gets cut out. Hutcheon doesn’t hesitate to include music in her case studies (e.g. Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites (1957) and Britten’s Billy Budd (1951)) and I hope to bring additional depth to her discussions of how, exactly, music ‘transcodes’ – how composers think adaptation through. Hutcheon posits that

In composition that is in some way storytelling (from art song to tone poem to opera to film score, etc.), it is the composer’s job to think through how to tell the story in music; even when adaptational decisions appear to be made by someone else, like a librettist or director, the transcoding into music is the composer’s task. However, adaptation is not a set of skills often discussed as such in compositional training, nor in music criticism and scholarship. Of more than 50,000 studies of adaptation she catalogues, Kamilla Elliott identifies barely 2,000 that so much as mention adaptation into opera or other musical forms.³ Adopting Hutcheon’s focus on adaptation as the retelling of stories,⁴ I’ll turn to two operas – the ‘Ur-adaptive’ musical art inseparable from adaptation since its sixteenth-century origins.⁵ Music with text facilitates comparative study of the original source and the resulting adaptation, making it easier to observe adaptational choices. When the story now being told in musical form originates outside that work, the composer is an adapter – even if there are also other adapters involved. This, in turn, points to broader considerations of what the boundaries of adaptation might be.

Why Adapt?

Before thinking about how composers adapt, we should turn briefly to why. Hutcheon discusses the pleasures of adaptation: for a ‘knowing’ audience (that is, familiar with the source material) part of this pleasure comes from ‘repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’.⁶ But Hutcheon also notes the paradoxical status of adaptations in the ‘(post-)Romantic valuing of the original creation and of the originating creative genius’: legally, adaptations are ‘derivative works’ – a term which also points to their status in criticism as frequent objects of contempt.⁷ Though art music adaptations might circumvent that second-class status somewhat,⁸ musical adaptation is further complicated by the persistent privileging of ‘abstract’ music that does not tell story, use words, or involve singers. (This, of course, intersects with issues of identity, gatekeeping, and participation: who creates what kind of music for whom.)

Hutcheon writes extensively about the financial practicalities of adaptation, familiar to any composer who has had to write a grant application or a pitch sheet. An adaptational approach can make a project catchy (‘Cinderella, but a song cycle!’); similar shorthands for musical language or compositional approach are often incomprehensible to the people making financial decisions – they may be more comfortable evaluating a project on its storytelling. Adaptation into music from source material that has already been adapted into film offers further reassurance that adaptation into a showing medium will ‘work’ – it’s already been done – making it easier to envision for those who may be lacking in musical or theatrical facility. But the pragmatism of a ‘safe’ adaptation-investment risks trivialising a creator’s imagination and drags behind it the baggage of the fidelity conversation: how much interpretive and creative room will the adapters be afforded?

In a scathing review of Mason Bates’s opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs (2017; libretto by Mark Campbell), Anne Midgette criticises the opera industry for its failure to advance innovative storytelling (as film and television have done), and, by implication, she condemns the opera industry’s reliance on the ‘safety’ of adaptations to coax investors to invest and audiences to buy tickets.

Midgette’s condemnation of this approach to opera creation – which holds up the perceived security of adaptation as insurance against executive jitters, audience disinterest, and creator incompetence – points to profound questions about what, exactly, music can bring to story, and what storytelling in music can be. Thinking about adaptation as ‘safe’ can lead to fundamental problems in creative approach, for the art of adaptation is not to reproduce a story but to imagine that story anew: ‘adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication’; adaptations ‘exist laterally, not vertically’… [suggesting that] ‘one way to think about unsuccessful adaptations is not in terms of infidelity to a prior text, but in terms of a lack of the creativity and skill to make the text one’s own and thus autonomous.’¹⁰We might call this a ‘negative test’ for adaptation.

‘Making Plastic’

What music can do, in adaptation, is much more complex than the reproduction or regurgitation of plot. Via Hutcheon, we can understand adaptation into musical forms as transcoding across media and genres, most often from those that tell stories (novels, etc.) to those that show them (including all performance media).¹¹ She introduces a third mode of engagement: interaction (physical, kinaesthetic).¹² Musical adaptation involves this mode as well, through sound’s vibrational impact on the body and the kinaesthetic sympathetic response of watching and hearing musical performance – as the field of sound studies illuminates. Depictions and perceptions of time are another area in which music has special transcoding tools. The drive of pulse (or lack thereof), the pacing of rates of change (harmonic, rhythmic, textural, etc.), and the visceral kinaesthetic experience of tempi can manipulate our experience of the passage of time – as Stravinsky explains in his discussion of ontological, psychological, and musical time in his Poetics.¹³

Recall Carolyn Abbate’s description of Wagner’s decisions in Der junge Siegfried (1876) to ‘mak[e] plastic’ – palpable, visible, auditory, enacted – what was originally told only in narrative.¹⁴ Abbate’s ‘making plastic’ is the transcoding into music that Hutcheon’s adaptation requires: not ‘music appended’ but sound enacting. This can be as straightforward as word-painting (twinkling stars, twinkly sounds; the piano figuration in Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade (1814)) or as complex as the ambivalent ironies of Benjamin Britten’s ‘34 chords’ in Act II of Billy Budd (1951).

Compression and Expansion

A frequent theme in Hutcheon’s book is the ‘necessary compression’ of source material in many forms of adaptation: what is selected from the original and what is left out. Adaptations into music (especially opera) are scolded for this regularly in criticism, as the need to compress often produces startlingly short libretti with one-dimensional plots and characters.¹⁵ (‘The morally loaded discourse of fidelity’ raises its head.¹⁶) This is, of course, because ‘it takes much longer to sing than to say a line of text, much less read one.’¹⁷ Thus, musical adaptation generally involves both compression and expansion in the same moment: a Venturi effect. The compression Hutcheon writes about is really in the first step of adaptation: from source material to libretto, song text, and so on. But the second step – the adaptation of that text into music – can expand that text not only in the duration of delivery, but in pulling the text into multiple experiential dimensions through the complexities of musical transcoding. Let us see that at work in two case studies.

Listening List

https://shorturl.at/drxV0

I’m writing from the Wurundjeri lands of the Kulin nation in Naarm or Melbourne, Australia and I acknowledge the traditional owners of this country on which I sit and pay my respects to their Elders. I greet the Custodians, the Elders and Spirits of the places where you are.

For the Wurundjeri community, ‘the natural world is also a cultural world’.¹ They, as do many other Indigenous peoples, understand, and relate to the land as alive, as sentient, and are attuned to an ecological register of the world. By ecological I mean the sense that everything is profoundly intra-connected and dynamically contingent. Our lives, thoughts and actions are intertwined and co-constituted with many other living (biotic, abiotic, physical and virtual) systems. This entangled relationship implicates us. Rather than looking from a privileged position from the outside in, we are already in medias res; in the midst of the action. Our presence in the story demands an ethics of care – does our presence enliven or deaden the world? It makes us conscious of an ethics of time – if the world is fully alive and mutually co-emergent, then it matters how histories and futures flow within, through and between us.

This chapter explores ways of thinking about ecology through the medium and capacities offered by sound and music. The discipline of listening is a recurring feature in works that engage with ecological issues, acting as the methodology that shapes not just the selection of musical materials but that draws in wider contexts of music- and meaning-making. Alongside the given examples there are a number of exercises and provocations that suggest ways of developing one’s own approaches to composition. A short bibliography provides some guidance for further reading and listening.

Exploring Emergent Animacy

Part of Indigenous ecological understandings in Australia and elsewhere is that humans are just one kind of person amongst many other persons. I grew up in a place – Brunei, on the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia – where birds, animals, trees, a river, the wind, or musical instruments are addressed as kin: mother, father, sister, brother, grandmother, grandfather. But this animistic register of treating things as persons can also be related to familiar technologies. For instance, computers and mobile phones might be thought of as quasi-animate extensions of ourselves; more than tools, they are alluring companion creatures which we speak to and with and which speak to us, co-creating the narratives of who we are and thereby shaping how we navigate the world.

The Covid-19 pandemic and climate emergencies demonstrate the functioning of ecological relations in stark and everyday terms. The precariousness of the Earth as an inhabitable planet is not a remote intellectual idea but something we experience viscerally. The complexity of the Anthropocene, an epoch of vast human-generated eco-systemic crises, creates a cognitive load that forces us to search for new stories to navigate our entanglement with what eco-critical writer Anna Tsing and others have called ‘ghosts and monsters’.² These include ghosts of multi-species extinctions and the hauntings of environmental destruction, and the arrival of biotic and elemental beings – viruses, hurricanes, heatwaves and wildfires – that operate at monstrous scales.

Writers in the environmental humanities are bringing a radical interdisciplinarity to what they describe as modes of worlding: the arts, sciences and humanities are brought into productive speculative interaction in order to invent new models for knowing and being. Leading thinker Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the Trouble says: ‘Stories for living in the Chthulucene [her preferred term instead of the Anthropocene] demand a certain suspension of ontologies and epistemologies, holding them lightly, in favor of more venturesome, experimental natural histories.’³ It is this speculative stance that I would like to encourage as part of compositional practice because composers make music but also invoke the meanings, the stories, what one might call theory, around that music.

American composer Alvin Lucier’s work I am sitting in a room (1969) shows that every space is alive with its signature acoustic voice. Lucier’s work is built on a feedback loop between his speaking voice and the acoustic properties of a room filtered through a tape recorder. By recording the voice, playing it back into the room, re-recording it and so on, the work unfolds a process whereby one can hear the inherent melodies and harmonies of the room. In the end there is a symbiosis of human and room in which the resonant frequencies of the space are phrased in the rhythm of the now unintelligible words.

Irish composer and artist Barbara Ellison’s Drawing Phantoms (2012–), like Lucier’s piece, involves a feedback process in which the repeated actions of drawing, tracing and retracing circular or looping shapes on paper can induce a trance state in the person drawing, whilst giving rise to a rhythmic sonic world of subtly changing sounds. Amplification of the paper with a contact microphone brings the tiniest deviations of the physical activity to the fore and what emerges is an extraordinarily rich and hauntingly evocative polyphony of whispered voices.

Telling Stories to Create Worlds

Haraway says, ‘it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with … It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’⁴ Stories are powerful operators – language, terms, narratives – these allow one to recognise, imagine and constitute some realities whilst obscuring others. I’m fascinated by the double-faced nature of storytelling which will prioritise some things whilst muting other kinds of knowing. I’m interested in the power of storytelling as theory-making and mode of analysis in music. This is a manoeuvre to reach beyond the epistemic zone in Western classical music theory where the use of stories is usually dismissed or devalued as ‘mere analogy’ and ‘mere programme music’. What might be thinkable, knowable, and tellable through this speculative work? Where might an ecological consciousness take us as artists as we attend to the complexity of the world beyond the human? Using more unusual terms for work-processes, how might these ideas also inflect, disrupt, contaminate, reorder, or enrich the nature of that music-making: how we work, with and for whom, with which resources and to what ends?

Contemporary sound artists, composers and performers have long been responding to ecological issues, using art to raise consciousness, interact with non-human species and environments, connect communities, and tell stories in new ways. Artists also work in dialogue with scientists, playing an important complementary role in developing communication strategies around the urgencies of climate change. British pianist, inventor and composer Sarah Nicolls has built an ecosystem of creative practice and community activism through her work Twelve Years: A Recital-story (2018) that addresses the 2018 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report. The one-hour work interweaves music for piano and voice with recordings of speeches by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and climate change headlines set amongst at times humorous fictional dialogues covering a spectrum of responses. Nicolls has performed the work in tandem with discussions involving scientists and activists, providing audiences with information about how they can reduce carbon emissions and engage in political processes to demand change.

Nicolls’ work illustrates ways of creatively responding to ecological issues especially around the use of role-play and interpersonal narratives to explore complex and ambivalent emotional states. Other examples of musical responses that are catalysed by ecological issues have their roots in areas of acoustic ecology, sonification or in conceptual work developed in the visual arts. Acoustic ecology and the use of field recordings in music foregrounds the power of sound to access information and ways of knowing tethered to very specific times, places, and cultural conditions. It offers ways for artists to work directly with the materiality of emplaced, encultured sounds and to transmute these found forms into new imaginings. Another productive approach lies in the sonification of scientific data including the translation of climate statistics into musical dimensions – pitch, duration, volume, density, orchestration, or even elements of performance behaviour or notations – to tell a story that might cut through the emotional paralysis brought on by overwhelming facts. The Anthropocene has generated new aesthetic categories or reconfigured old ones around the entanglement of human and more-than-human life-worlds. The experience of climate change effects has prompted exploration of aesthetic forms that play with changing scales of perception that suggest the possibility of expanding our sensory capacities beyond purely human points of reference.

Acoustic Ecology

Australian acoustic ecologist and sound artist Leah Barclay, with her ambitious and inspiring Biosphere Soundscapes (2012), works at the intersection of the arts, sciences and sustainability projects. Working in close collaboration with people across the global network of UNESCO biosphere reserves in 119 countries, the project supports communities in working to conserve both biological and cultural diversity. Her practice has evolved from making interactive soundscape compositions, for example, Wira: Floating Land (2015) installed along the Noosa River in Queensland, Australia, to collaborating with scientists to monitor biodiversity in environments such as river systems, reefs or dense rainforest in the Amazon, situations where sound can be one of the most effective tools for evaluating the presence or absence of species. Through her soundscape practice, Barclay has developed accessible (simple, cheap and robust) recording tools and set up education programs for young people and communities to use them. What is significant is the depth with which her creative work meets conservation and regeneration activity that is aligned with community empowerment and emotional and social well-being. She says: ‘There is an urgent need to listen to the state of our environment and facilitate a sense of interconnection within communities globally. “Sound” as a catalyst and creative medium is undoubtedly one of the most powerful means to stimulate this shift in consciousness.’⁵

The practice of acoustic ecology reveals how listening allows one to tune into the environment more rapidly than any other sense. The founder of the World Forum of Acoustic Ecology is German composer Hildegard Westerkamp whose radio piece Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989) is a classic of ecological world-making though story. Through narration and the contrasting environmental sounds of water lapping on barnacles and the roaring city noises of Vancouver, she teaches one to attend to the subjective nature of listening. She draws our attention to technical sleights of hand in the changing layers of sound woven with excerpts of music by Xenakis and Mozart whilst spinning suggestive tales of wonder and terror in dream-like sequences. At the end of the work, she offers a way to integrate these disparate experiences: ‘As soon as I make space to hear sounds like this, or to dream them, then I feel the strength to face the city again – or even, to be playful with it … play with the monster, then I can face the monster.’ She describes this kind of work as ‘essentially an enquiry into our relationship to place through listening and an enquiry into listening itself. Conscious attention to the soundscape is like learning a new language and conscious listening and sound-making is a way of placing ourselves inside the workings of our cultures, societies and landscapes as involved, living participants.’⁶

Westerkamp’s soundwalk practice highlights connections between the perception of external sounds and internal thoughts, emotions and sensations, opening up a depth of field in the act of listening. The listener becomes the composer and the performer. Westerkamp says, by ‘listen[ing] to very specific sounds the ears are opened to all sounds in the environment. Listening to footsteps is a simple way of contemplating the relationship between our own sounds and those of the world around us – a relationship that is also in constant flux. It is a way of becoming conscious not only of our own role as soundmakers, but also of the many sound interactions around us.’⁷

Sonification

Sonification is the process of translating data into sound – well-known scientific applications include sonar which makes audible measurements of ocean depths, or Geiger counters that sonify degrees of radioactivity in an environment. Composers have also turned to environmental data to generate music using processes that range from direct forms of one-to-one mapping which are not too far removed from the systematic scientific approach – for example, equating numbers to pitches or durations – to multi-dimensional transformations that track complex phenomena across very large timescales. One example of the latter is John Luther Adam’s The Place Where You Go to Listen (2006) which is an ongoing work that sonifies meteorological data, cosmological, geomagnetic, and seismological activity detected in various Alaskan locations into a spatialised electronic sound- and light-installation work. The work is an analogue of the dynamic and ever-changing patterns and rhythms of place across night and day, seasons, and years. Adams says: ‘This is not a predetermined sequence of musical events … It is a dynamic system of visible and audible forces interacting in a constantly changing environment.’⁸

The examples given so far mainly focus on the sensory capacity of listening to sounds, but what if one cannot hear sounds? There are other forms of earwitness that stretch our usual conceptions of sound and story. Christine Sun Kim is a Korean American artist working with sound and its visual representations. She is also a member of the Deaf community and uses American sign language, music notation and captioning to make conceptually rich works that reflect on sound’s agency as social and political currency. She defines the sonic as ‘a multi-sensory phenomenon, one whose properties are auditory, visual, and spatial, as well as socially determined’.⁹ Kim’s The Sound of Temperature Rising Non-Stop Forever (2020) is a public artwork that was exhibited on a billboard above a freeway in Los Angeles, California that employs playful means to connect audiences to a confronting message that is often met with denial. In the billboard work the alarming reality of record temperature rises is turned into a conceptual score of elongated notes of decreasing durational value whose imaginary music continues off the chart as an analogue to the way climate effects are approaching irreversible tipping points.

Aesthetics of the More-than-Human

American composer Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects (2017), like Kim’s work, unsettles our normative understandings and experiences of sensory perception. They describe the opera as ‘an immersive work of music theatre that wrestles with the animate vitality of matter and the mounting hum of ecological anxiety around us. The project is driven by a desire to tune our focus toward a rate of change (impossibly slow) and a scope of alteration (unthinkably vast) at odds with the scale of human life.’¹⁰ In the work subwoofers are employed to vibrate below the range of human hearing; musicians whisper-shout and perform a dissociated dramaturgy of catastrophe ‘as if some future frantic state reaches us only in slow motion’.¹¹ Fure with a team including their brother, architect Adam Fure, and members of New York City’s International Contemporary Ensemble created an installation environment of sculptural objects used as instruments to make a work attuned to an ecological precarity that challenges thresholds of human perception.

Kathryn Yusoff, in her article ‘Epochal Aesthetics: Affectual Infrastructures of the Anthropocene’ says: ‘The Anthropocene renders visible new architectures of time and matter, both sedimenting existing genealogies of global-world-space and radically reorganizing an imagination of the scope and material duration of what the human is in and through time.’ She puts forward the challenge that ‘If the Anthropocene is to be a truly epochal moment, surely things ought to look different than the dominant Western imagination of human-environmental relations. None of the old stories of Man, Man contemplating Man, Man vs. Nature, Man as Nature, Man as Governor/Steward/ Modernizer/Innovator/Entrepreneur of Nature, will do.’¹² In a fracturing of these kinds of universalising patriarchal views, she calls for new tactics and imaginaries.

Ashley Fure’s opera provides a prime example of Yusoff’s concepts of a ‘new rendering of time, subjectivity and agency’,¹³ although there’s a danger that treating the Anthropocene as an aesthetic event is a further dissociative symptom of our times. As I said earlier, stories are double-sided (or multi-sided) things that simultaneously reveal and conceal. What happens when we investigate other kinds of aesthetic realities that stem from the more-than-human? What would that story reveal in terms of what we find beautiful, valuable, resonant, or vice versa?

New ways of thinking about time and the subjectivities of time are perhaps particularly interesting and productive for composers. The Anthropocene, as Yusoff says, brings us into contact with ‘new orders of time’; with time paradoxes formed in the provisionalities of the ‘now’ and through ruptures in continuities. Clashing timescales and simultaneities of stasis and acceleration are brought to the fore. An awareness of geologic time and deep time is suddenly brought into consciousness in the present because of rapid species extinction. A sense of apocalyptic time infects the subjectivities of lived time when the future seems foreshortened (the 2018 IPCC report’s twelve-year time frame to mitigate global warming is now seven years and counting down). We encounter strange effects of the stretching and compression of experience: pandemic boredom against the rapidity of news cycles. Our sense of individual and collective subjectivities and identities is further shifted through ubiquitous technologies to uncanny effect: What is real, what is fake? What is original, and what is a copy? It’s no wonder that a yearning for time past finds expression both in retro-, vintage fashions and in political longings for a phantom vision of the past.

Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus

In my own compositional practice, ecological thinking is not equated with nature but rather a blurring or removal of the nature–culture distinction. I’m curious to find ways of exploring how objects, materials, bodies, and places, performance practices, technologies, cultural histories, performers, composers, and listeners might collaborate, metabolise, and condition each other or disturb, create ruptures in, and de-compose situations in unexpectedly generative ways. This can lead to interesting ways of thinking about so-called compositional materials so that the technical, aesthetic and ethical entwine. How can one work with, activate or amplify these complex assemblages in a compositional setting?

My work Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) is a large forty-minute chamber work for twelve instruments written for the Austrian group Ensemble Klangforum Wien. One can analyse the piece as an assemblage of various kinds of extinction events which are transposed into or traced as aesthetic effects into music. These include a transcription of the last recorded call of the now extinct Hawaiian Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird staged as an act of faulty ventriloquism (a piccolo approximating a bird). There’s a meditation on the effects of plastic pollution (a ‘ghost’ of the petrochemical industry) circulated and ground down in the oceans transposed into time processes: loops, glitches and incomplete repetitions used as ways of describing the behaviours of this substance. There are references to found objects such as highly fragmented and obscured quotations of nineteenth-century piano music (Leoš Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path (1900–11)) and my own previous work (the violin solo The Su Song Star Map (2017)) evoking nostalgia or time past in a state of collapse.

The final movement of the work is entitled ‘Dawn Chorus’ which refers not to a chorus of birds but rather of fish. I drew on research from scientists who make recordings of coral reefs to judge the relative ecological health of underwater environments and transcribed the drone and the buzzing, rasping, burping sounds of fish to generate musical zones. In the early part of the movement amongst the droning sounds of an aquatic environment I ask the musicians to improvise a melody in unison on kazoos. It’s a paradoxical instruction: ‘play a spontaneously invented shared line’. What results is a performance of group mind; there is a chorusing effect as the musicians engage in listening and tuning in to each other. Here in their collectivity, the act of sharpening their sense of listening is a gesture towards what is perhaps most demanded of humans in a time of ecological crisis.

The noise of droning, buzzing fish-talk goes on; it’s deliberately boring or seems to go on for far too long. Like Fure’s work, it opens an aesthetic territory around attention and duration. Eventually, the piece ends with the contrabassoon sounding a low F below its normal playing range, achieved by extending the instrument with an extra metre and a half of plastic tubing. At a notional twenty-two hertz, the sound sits at the threshold of human hearing. There’s an aesthetic strangeness in this fish dawn chorus in the way it starts to challenge the range of human hearing and attention. In making this music, I ask if there is potential for a so-called ecological art to act not only as protest or awareness raising but to more deeply unsettle our relationship with the usual surface tension of everyday reality.

The internet is full of strange, terrifying aesthetic conjunctions connected to climate catastrophe: striking images that recall paintings by Brueghel that are of people and animals sheltering on a beach under apocalyptic skies during Australia’s summer wildfires of 2019–20; a whale choked by plastic thrown by the ocean deep into the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, appearing like some surrealist sculpture; YouTube recordings of magpies imitating ambulance sirens; or the endangered Australian Regent Honeyeater singing other bird’s songs because there are too few of their species left for the young to learn and sustain their own calls.

Listening as Ecological Collaboration

I have already pointed to examples of work in which listening is a powerful tool in developing ecological perception. Listening brings us into forms of being and doing with the world in an adaptive way. The listening sense allows one to notice the dynamic workings of emergence showing us how we ourselves co-produce experiences and their meanings. That understanding of co-production can be a potent force for social change.

American composer Pauline Oliveros, one of the founding figures of experimental and electronic music, developed her ‘Deep Listening’ method and theory in the 1970s to train a radical practice of listening. ‘Deep Listening is active,’ she says.

Her ‘Sonic Meditations’ and ‘Deep Listening’ pieces are compositions in the form of text scores (i.e. prose instructions) that provide attention strategies which she says ‘are nothing more than ways of listening and responding in consideration of oneself, others and the environment.’¹⁵ She might also have expressed this as ‘nothing less than ecological immersion in the world’!

Oliveros’ radical feminist practice of witness which hones a full body awareness and attunement to the environment has inspired the ‘SONIC MATTER_openlab: The Witness’ research platform which ‘brings together artists, scientists, activists, and local groups through joint sonic, anthropological, ecological, sociological, and site-specific work processes in different parts of the world.’¹⁶ One of these labs is a project of futurist dreaming through sound created as a collaboration between the Sápara spiritual leader Manari Ushigua, activist Belén Páez, Sápara youth in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the multi-species personhood of the forest itself, the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, sound artist Fabian Kueva, flautist Claire Chase and other musicians. Across widely dispersed geographical locations, relying on the internet and zoom, the group are using Oliveros’ work The Witness (1989) with its three strategies for listening, attuning, and responding to the natural environment and to one another, as the methodology for a cross-cultural, interspecies collaboration between forests and peoples. The work weaves together artistic, spiritual, and political threads that are underpinned by what the group calls ‘vital song’. The song is vitalising because it connects pasts through presents and futures and gives tangible outcomes, whether supporting an envisioning of Indigenous Sápara models for educating new leaders or strengthening community processes for writing legal documents that protect the rainforest from extractive damage, and by nurturing bonds between the forest and humans so that one can speak through the other.¹⁷

The following is a text score by Pauline Oliveros from her ‘Deep Listening’ collection:

What is clear from Oliveros’ work and projects such as ‘SONIC MATTER_openlab: The Witness’ is that listening invites collaboration. It invites an active collaboration with others and the energies of all things as living beings; it invites multi-modal practices and distributed creativity; it can propel new stories to come into being. Listening is the basis for knowledges formed in emergent interactive processes and brings an orientation to ideas of justice and an ethics of care. Sound is not just what we hear but a means for manifesting awareness. As eco-anthropologist Tim Ingold says, ‘sound … is not the object but the medium of our perception. It is what we hear in.’¹⁹

I’ve discussed the work of composers, performers, and sound artists who align with these ideas in the ways they craft disciplines of paying attention and whose engagement with ecological concerns has led them to prioritise relationality in their work. The exercises and provocations in this chapter provide prompts for further creative questions in making music. They model ways of making and doing through which we might refresh our senses and grow our awareness of a co-arising world in which wonder sits within any seemingly mundane moment. Artistic practices can attune us to human and more-than-human justice and play a generative role in navigating various cognitive-emotional complexities in our time. To listen attentively is to bring a compositional sensing to place and presence. As specialists in the arts of attention, as aural witnesses, musicians contribute to the evolution of social relations and have opportunities to make change at systemic levels. At the same time, this work taps into subtle dimensions of cultural insight through speculative and sensuous aesthetic play.

A story of striving and doing is justifiably worthy but as Oliveros said, listening also ‘changes us’. Oliveros’ work is fundamentally holistic and is about transformation at all levels. Another story for us may be to trust in those acts of listening that reach into the environment in a co-arising interplay of Self and World that thereby expands what we know as us. Through listening we might hone a well-tuned sense of responsibility where ethical leadership manifests as a consequence of noticing our symbiotic entanglement with all things. As we collaborate with everything that is around us, we may access a wonderful vitality as we find that the weather outside meets the weather inside.

Listening List

https://shorturl.at/lvHY2