Allegro and 120 are not the Same Thing

What's the difference between writing quarter note = 120 and writing "Allegro"?
120 is a number that means nothing.  Allegro means "joyfully," "happily." Allegro is meaningful.
Adagio, BTW, means at ease, and Andante means walking speed.  (Note that we do not have charming Italian words for "selfishly," "redundantly," or "in an academically impressive manner.")

Tempo and expression markings sometimes connect us to our musical past in an important way. If you play a Bach prelude at 120, it's not as good as if you play it the same speed "Allegro," joyfully.  Imbue the music with human feelings.  Notes of different length, volume and rhythm will come out when you do.
The same goes backwards for composition - we should not be thinking 120, or 72 or 144 when we write, but Allegro, Andante, and Presto. These words have a history with musicians, and our music will come out differently.
BTW, a "movement" originated as a movement of the spirit.  What moved you, spiritually, to write this 6 minute collection of notes??  Don't you think your listener is in this to be moved?  How is she going to be moved if you aren't?  Osmosis? Pheremones?
A lot of other words are instructive: a "motif" gives motion to music, it motivates, it is a seed or kernel of energy that spawns creativity.  A "phrase" says something. (Duh.)  A "passage" passes from one place to another. If you think about the real meaning of the words we use to describe sections of music, it almost writes itself.  Come up with a lick that generates a phrase that says something, and leads to other phrases that make up a passage that takes the listener somewhere.  Three more passages and you have a movement of the spirit. Three more varied movements of the spirit and you have a "concert;" a set of pieces that demonstrate what the ensemble can do - a symphony, motet, cantata, sonata or concerto.
One cannot impose an inhuman formal design on music.  History tells us that the ears can only be engaged in certain meaningful ways. Western music is narrative, which means it is effective only when it describes the effect of forces on an observed thing.  Sonata Allegro form, for example, states a theme, a thing, which interacts with a distinct counterforce (the B section in the dominant key), after which they fight (development) and the counterforce is conquered and restated in the tonic key.  Then there's an ending.  This is not just fortuitous - human storytelling is about helping each other by retelling stories of how forces interact - natural forces, emotional forces, mystical forces. Music, as an analogue to language, can go much further in describing the interaction of emotional and spiritual forces. That's why it is beloved.
I'm not saying don't be modern.  I'm saying don't be stupid. Music has meaning because of human experience and your music needs to be meaningful to be emotionally and artistically satisfying to your players and listeners. A great deal can be learned about how to pull that off from past masterpieces.  The trick in writing effective modern music is knowing what to steal from the past and what to change.
Progress, change in music is incremental, just like in evolution.  Anteaters didn't just all of a sudden develop long noses, and none of us is going to solve all of the problems of 20th century harmony in our next chamber piece. Build on what you know is right, and innovate slowly and carefully, with respect for your performers and audience. Karma. Non?

Appreciating Mario Davidovsky

I started an email friendship with Alex Shapiro yesterday.  A charming composer and grounded individual with a background similar to mine.  A New Yorker, 2-3 years younger than me, started out in music school, moved away from NY, decided to downshift out of the American fast lane.  She now lives on a small island near Canada on the Pacific NW coast.
Anyway, she writes enjoyable soundscapes that hover between abstract timbral wanderings and tonal vistas.  Tasteful, but also marketable. We discussed the idea of being yourself, writing for yourself and ignoring peer pressure. I sometimes long for the tonal universe where the path to writing quality music is clear and easy for me to navigate. It doesn't satisfy me as much as the abstract sound world I have recently discovered, but other people sure as hell connect with it.
So what share of our musical output should reasonably be devoted to just writing to meet the demand for music? If you don't need the money (what little there is of it), is there a valid argument that slumming it in the tonal world occasionally is an acceptable way to stay popular and social? I sometimes feel the need for validation by a larger audience of actual, mature humans. Call it a weakness or arrogance, but it is what it is.
I was informed recently that one of my tonal pop hymns is the most requested song at funerals at the church I used to attend. I am touched by things like that. Who wouldn't be?
Anyway, Davidovsky may represent a compromise. I had an assignment to lecture on him and his wonderful music this week at GSU.  Originally, I had him pegged as a 12 tone composer; however, it turns out he was not a strict serialist but more of what I call an "abstract-by-ear" composer. His harmonic language is chromatic and sophisticated, but also lyrical and within a tonal grey area.
Synchronisms #9 (1988), for violin and tape, is a beautiful piece, and even the tonal writers in class appreciated it. Davidovsky fused gorgeous abstract solo string writing with the synthetic electronic timbres he has mastered to create 8 minutes of bliss.
I get the same vibe from Augusta Read Thomas' music - I think the answer, as I've said before, is to write at the PIANO, not the computer.  While it is useful to impose 12-tone or other restrictions upon yourself, the ear has to be the final arbiter. There is something within (or without)(I'm not sure) that is larger than your musical cleverness.
Plus ask yourself, WHY am I using 12-tone techniques?
Personally, I like the contrapuntal textures that result, the interesting harmonies, and the modern sound. All of that could be achieved by ear, but I think if I did that, I would end up imitating other composers too much.  Maybe not.  Maybe I'll try trusting my ear more on this next piece, Acid Snow.
BTW, I am trying to make Acid Snow (for percussion ensemble, brass quintet and piano four-hands) about the bliss of admiring and desiring someone, the grief of realizing you will never be together, and the peace that ultimately results from believing you are worthy of love whether he or she loves you or not.  3 movements. The snow is gorgeous as it falls, turns to acid hitting your skin, but then the pain subsides and you heal.
So maybe there can be an interplay between abstract harmony and diatonic sonorities, between regular pulsed rhythms and asymmetric rhythms, and between densely packed chromaticism and static, relaxing passages.
So many ways to tell a story with sound!
The trick is to come up with some material and sculpt it, using everything you are today, as best you can, with love. What else can you ever do?  Why get pissed when the results throw you off course and refuse to play nice?  That's where you grow! It's called learning . . .

For those who need that last reference placed in context, I offer the following, from Hot Shots! Part Deux:

"Topper Harley: [Angry] Harbinger. I was right, wasn't I? You sabotaged all of the other missions. I find that totally unacceptable.

Harbinger: [Sobbing] You got me wrong. All this shooting and killing. I can't go on.
[Begins to cry]

Topper Harley: [Consoling] Hey, hey, hey, rainy face. Hey, proud warrior. Let the sun come out, you bad G.I. Joe. You know, Kitten, we all have permission to make mistakes. It's called “learning."  Here, why don't you give uncle Topper a nice, big blow.               

Harbinger: [Blows into Topper's handkerchief] I'm done.                                

Topper Harley: Atta boy.  [The handkerchief is a bag of snot; he drops it, and hands Harbinger a gun and shoots a few Iraqis]

Harbinger: Thank you, Topper. I can kill again, you've given me another reason to live."

Aw, hell, just one more:

"Topper Harley: Ramada, I want to be with you. I want to hold you. I want to meet your parents and pet your dog...

Ramada Rodham Hayman: My parents are dead, Topper. My dog ate them." 

In Defense of Elitism in Music

I'm reading Ariel by Jose Enrique Rodo.  Rodo was an Uruguayan philosopher and wrote this book in 1900. In it he generally bemoans the tendency of modern culture toward mediocrity, especially in democratic societies.  He believes, however, in the ultimate triumph of democracy in laying the foundation for high culture and noble citizens:

[A]ll rational beings are gifted by nature with faculties that make them capable of growing in nobility.  It is the duty of the State to provide all members of society with the conditions that will lead to their perfection.  It is the duty of the State to provide the necessary conditions that will lead to the development of human superiorities wherever they exist. In this way, if all are granted initial equality, subsequent inequality will be justified, since it will bear the sanction either of the mysterious selection of Nature or of meritorious effort of will. 

I was reading about the Zhdanov decree of 1948 that attempted to censor Soviet composers Shostakovich, Katchaturian and Prokofiev for being too "formalistic."  The idea of writing instrumental music of chromatic complexity that was unsingable by the working masses was condemned.  In the US, we have a different kind of censorship called starvation (either write what the undifferentiated morons want to hear or go without food).

Shostakovich was better off, but neither system seems to have embraced Rodo's imperative of furnishing all people the means to excel.  Or perhaps they each adopted false definitions of excellence: Soviet Realism on the one hand, Gangham Style on the other.  What we call "democracy" in modern America is corrupted by hypercapitalism to the point where the needs of ordinary people are less important,  including their intellectual and spiritual development. Conservatives simply do not agree that "All rational beings are gifted by nature with faculties that make them  capable of growing in nobility."

Charles Wuorinen has said, in various interviews, that he eschews government support of the arts and prefers private patronage. This upset me at first, but I understand where he's coming from now. The government is of the people.  If the people have no taste, neither will their government. There is no automatic appointment of discriminating critics to high government arts administration posts, certainly not in contemporary reactionary America.  American realism, Soviet realism - nobody wants to admit that modern music reflects modern life and is an accurate summation of our emotional distress. The most funding is available to people writing in a style that is 150 years old.  It is politically expedient.

There is a certain false and vulgarized concept that conceives of education as totally subordinate to a utilitarian end.  Such utilitarianism, with its attendant premature specialization, mutilates spiritual integrity and tends to suppress from learning all that is selfless and ideal.

If you can read Rodo without weeping too much for our failed nation, it is uplifting and satisfying.

Of all the desirable elements of a rational existence, the sense of the beautiful, the clear vision of the beauty of things, is the sense most quickly withered by the daily round, making of it an attribute to be preserved by a minority in that society as an abandoned treasure.

Parents sending their kids to school in America today expect them to be trained in useful arts, as if this has been and always will be the norm. This is why our children are undignified boors. Private school used to focus on refinement and charm, but no longer. We are a society of sports fans now, slavishly working toward no noble purpose except winning at any cost and consuming everything we can.  Our hypercapitalism is raping the planet of resources and employing brutal imperialist tactics on poor people.  In order to maintain the supremacy of our commercial institutions, we violate the sovereign airspace of other countries and assassinate people from the sky.  We torture people we believe aim to hurt our economic interests. We do this.  Us.

All I can do, in response to that, is set a personal example of compassion, nobility and discipline. In my little niche of music, I will hold life sacred, celebrate the beautiful complexity of the universe, and write music that me and my friends get and you don't.  Nothing else makes sense.  I am an elitist.  Go screw yourself.

In Praise of Amateurism

If I ever write a book on composition, I think I would have a chapter on "Going Pro," inspired by Stephen Pressfield's book, The War of Art, and a chapter called "Staying an Amateur."
Going Pro: in terms of your work ethic, your music business dealings, and your notation, there is every reason to be a mature professional at all times.  There are cold hard facts to be faced, and your music isn't going to write itself.  Setting up your life to facilitate daily work on music, building a reputation in the business as a serious person, and producing scores and parts that are responsive to the needs of performers - these things are necessary if you take yourself seriously, which you should.
Staying an Amateur: professionalism can get out of hand. Once you change a d-natural to a d-flat in order to advance your "career," you have gone too far with the professionalism.  Something of the amateur must be preserved, and it is the courage to write what you really like. Amateurs do amateurish things; things that critics deplore but that history smiles upon.  Art and music are not driven forward by workmanlike pieces. Well crafted music and art litter the landfills of time. Why? Because life is not reflected in the mundane. We're not building widgets here, we're taking dictation from god.

Life finds a way

Life jams. Life shreds. Life mutates. That's how it adapts and endures. Art is the same way. To maximize your potential, then, stay stupid when it comes to style.  Explore whatever you feel like.  Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing - not to be clever, but to make it your own and redefine music.
Once you lose confidence in your own artistic judgment, you're screwed. You will maybe win contests and impress faculty committees by trying hard to fit in, but an artist you're not.  There is no time to worry about your skills - it can be argued that the best art is created by people who halfway don't know what they're doing. Not just art - the Wright brothers were bicycle repairmen, right? And Columbus thought he had found Japan.

The music you like is worthy to be written, warts and all. When you write to please someone else, it better be for a lot of money because it's a waste of time artistically. If they want you to write like Jennifer Higdon, you can only ultimately fail, because you're the Higdon substitute, not the real thing. She will always do it better.  There have been art forgeries throughout the ages and none of those artists are known or cared about.  Those painters were obviously great craftsmen who gave the market what it wanted, yet . . . name one.
How do you know when a piece is done?  When you can't make it any more pleasing to you. Not when it sounds like John Adams.  If it pleases you to sound like John Adams, there's something wrong with you.  Love who you are, be who you are, and hold your ground until they put a gun to your head.  Come out of the closet.  Even people who don't care for your music will respect your courage.
And 50 years after you die, they will respect your music as well.
I'm in the middle of editing a motet called "Ni Pioniraj," and I think I have strayed too far trying to de-abstract the music. All I'm hearing is compromise and pandering.  I think I need to take my own advice and get stupid. Follow the white rabbit.  Find bright shiny objects. Say oooh.

Composition Contests

Charles Ives, upon being awarded the Pulitzer  for his Third Symphony in 1947, gave away the money and is said to have commented, "Prizes are for boys, and I'm all grown up."

I am just returning to the world of serious music composition after a 30 year hiatus.  The professor I study with believes it is important to enter a lot of these contests they have for classical music.  Here's what I think of contests:
1. They're fun but unnecessary. It is fun to win (I won one last year), but mostly because someone you think you respect liked your music, validating your activity.  This can occur without doing the contest thing. As Steven Tyler said, you're worthy, you're worthy!
2.  They're not worth it.  It's kind of a joke because there's very little money in it and a whole lot of work.
3. They entice you to change your style to try and win, which is bad. If I'm gonna do a whole lot of work and mature as an artist, why should I conform to some other person's idea of what good music is?
4. They show how capitalism ruins art. Artists used to be Delphic oracles sharing the sacred vibrations of the gods with mere mortals.  Now we're 8 year olds fighting over a happy meal prize?
5. They force you to meet a deadline, which is good.  I currently justify my participation in contests this way.  A pro meets deadlines and doesn't quit. There's no reason not to be a pro if you care about this stuff.
6. They are corrupt and subjective. Of course, this is what we losers always say. But it's true.  The composers and professors who sit on the panels that judge the music are usually in one camp or another, and there are contentious little camps of artists in our world. Plus sometimes if an ensemble is putting on the contest, they are looking for something that will make them sound good and sell records. There are few objective criteria for awarding a prize to a composer.
7.  They build community and generate artistic activity.  . . . but in a Hunger Games kind of way, which is bad.

Ultimately, you have to think bigger than any contest.  Making truly badass art means taking risks; risks that are not usually rewarded in the contest setting.  It is no accident that most radically successful people throughout history were rejected at first by established "panels of experts" - the Beatles, Walt Disney,  Steve Jobs, Einstein.  Charles Ives in particular was soundly rejected in his early years by almost everyone.  Shouldn't we be cultivating the kind of self-confidence in artists that allows them to take artistic and emotional risks, rather than putting them through a cycle of forced imitation and self-flagellation?

In most endeavors, the marketplace doles out rewards for the best work, but there is no functioning market for classical music. (or pop music for that matter)

Lately my mantra has become - I believe that I am worthy of love.  Related to this is the fact that I have gifts of music to give before I die. I don't need a contest to prove either of these things - that I am worthy of love, or that my music is needed in the world.  Double bar.

Toward a Unified Theory of Art and Education

Narrative, in education and the arts, is a tool that allows humanity to survive and advance.
What is narrative?  Telling a story.
Why tell a story? To relate to another human your observations, including the observed result of the interaction of forces upon objects.
How does that help? It builds collective knowledge of an environment and allows culture.
What kinds of narrative are there?  Romantic narrative describes the interaction of human forces (emotional or physical) upon each other or against natural forces (nature or gods). Classical narrative describes nature, either as such, or through symbolic objects, like gods. Some narrative extols the virtues of an object by describing its ability to stimulate human feelings (aria, still life, landscape), while other narrative describes the effect of forces on an object or objects over time (recitative, pas de deux, drama).  One could say there is static narrative and dynamic narrative in art, derived from scientific descriptions of the features of an object in a given environment (static) and the results of an experiment (dynamic).
Why you asking questions? Questions trigger a narrative response.  They seek a narrative describing the features of an object or the result of the interaction of forces in human terms. I have observed that questions result in narrative responses, and I'm describing the results of this previously observed experiment to you right now.  Dialectic.  Discourse. Reasoned argument.
Why is art a form of learning?  Learning takes place via narrative.  Teachers are storytellers cursed with retelling pretty boring (but useful) stories.  Sodium and Chlorine mix to make salt.  A true story, and miraculous in its own way, but not art. Romeo and Juliet, separated by family animus, find a way to be together, only to die tragically = art. Its a story that makes sense on a more complex, indescribable level. But it's still true and meaningful and useful to us, so it counts as education.
What is meaning?  The universe has no purpose; nothing, therefore, has any meaning except in human terms.  In space there is no north and south, no up and down, no motion except relative motion.  On earth, natural limitations give meaning to environmental descriptions.  Hot means "hot to a human." Up means "toward the sky, from the perspective of a human." It is meaningful only because the force of gravity makes up universally up.  Life has meaning because of death. "Sad" is meaningful only as a relative human experience (less contented).  When art assumes a narrative function and successfully describes a human observation or the interplay of observable forces, it has meaning. Music and art have meaning only to the extent they convey a useful narrative to humans.  No one else is listening.
Why is good music better than bad music?  Music can be understood as a pyramid: a four-sided triangle. One side is frequency, a scientific description of cycles per second of audible sound; one side is amplitude, a scientific description of the volume of sound; one side is rhythm, a scientific description of the placement of sound in time; and the last side is culture, the intended audience, and its listening skill level. The best music utilizes all four sides of the pyramid to create a self-reinforcing gestalt taking a narrative form for a noble purpose.  It is therefore meaningful, engaging, and sophisticated.  Bad music fails to effectively utilize all four sides of the pyramid, lacks a narrative form, or seeks an ignoble purpose.
Why is culture a feature of music? Art does not exist in a vacuum.  Since there is no purpose to the universe, music can only be valuable if it successfully communicates to a human audience.  Audiences differ.  Good music can fall on "deaf ears" - some audiences are not equipped intellectually or emotionally to appreciate some great music, just as a lecture in Spanish, even a very good lecture, is wasted on a French-speaking audience. Education happens at different levels and so does art. A student unfamiliar with algebra is not going to understand a lecture in trigonometry.  A student completely unfamiliar with jazz is not going to appreciate Miles Davis. The best experimental classical music begins with what is already our shared understanding of music, and describes the result of extended improvisation on previously covered material.  The right audience uses this to expand our collective knowledge of what constitutes meaning in music - our cultural language adopts a new phrase or idiom.
What has this got to do with learning? We learn through noble narrative. Basic narrative tells us where food is, where danger is, and guides the mating process.  Like bees that find sources of food and return to the hive to do the waggle dance, we have language to describe phenomena and the result of forces acting upon phenomena. Liberal Education is storytelling, and involves retelling the most useful stories: political history, the results of scientific experiments of the past, stories of how important people made certain life choices that resulted in benefits to humanity, and the results of communicating with others using different languages.  Arts Education goes further, and uses more complex and abstract stories to relate the results of the interaction of emotional forces, spiritual forces, and mathematical forces through the analogous manipulation of sound, fixed visual media, dance, and theatre. It is quite possible that advances in science are not possible without the abstraction of art: the more experimental thought processes of art "inspire" different approaches to scientific experimentation and the interpretation of history. All narrative, however, starts with intention in the heart of the teacher, the singer, the actor. A noble, beneficent purpose is the irreducible requirement of greatness.

Appreciating John Cage

John Cage said this:

 I was disturbed both in my private life and in my public life as a composer. I could not accept the academic idea that the purpose of music was communication, because I noticed that when I conscientiously wrote something sad, people and critics were often apt to laugh. I determined to give up composition unless I could find a better reason for doing it than communication. I found this answer from Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player: The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences. I also found in the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswammy that the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation.

Ruth Slenczynska said this:

Music is an integral part of living -  part of the air we breathe, a language more full of meaning than any spoken tongue. Communicative performance is the glorious beacon that can make even humdrum practicing a joy.

I think Cage was an interesting man.  The debate in our circles is whether he was a great composer in the Western Tradition. I don't know. I don't consider myself well-versed in Cage enough to judge him. By his own admission, he did not believe in fixing music in one position in order to share a human moment.  He liked to discover his own music along with the audience. 

I agree somewhat that the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation. The thing is, nature communicates to us and we share the beauty of nature by communicating through music.  It's complex and its beauty often depends on complexity. Here is a photo I took last week:

After studying Wuorinen's theories of fractal music, I had started to dabble in self-similar designs. Looking at this tree, you can see that the branches are balanced and resemble the trunk, which is also balanced. The branches get smaller as they reach the limits of the space definable by the energy of the tree-system. Up until the end they are self similar, but then - berries.  Seed pods, needles, leaves, flowers, stuff.  Random licks. It occurred to me that the underlying structures can be symmetrical and self-similar without continuing the self-similarity all the way to infinity. Fractals in nature break down because of limited energy in natural systems. And to follow function. Even a cauliflower, the most fractal of vegetables, doesn't go on forever. The surface level breakdown is often the beautiful part. 

So it is with music. The photograph above resembles a lot of Chinese painting I have seen. The space is structurally divided by an asymmetrical natural feature of some kind.  Branches, mountains, rocks, waves. Then, in the foreground, is something entirely different and of little consequence.  A boat, a panda, a flower or two. The art is in the organizing principle. And it comes from nature, and it's complex and asymmetrical.  And purposeful. And therefore engaging and beautiful. 

My point is that Cage is right about imitating nature, but nature supports Ruth Slenczynska's feelings about musical communication.  Organizing sound in order to share beauty involves complex, culture-bound communication.  Being chill is good, but people don't always listen to music to be quieted.  Sometimes they want to be enlightened, entertained, or transformed. Joy doesn't always just appear out of nowhere once you're relaxed. Providing joy through organized sound is a high calling.  A glorious beacon. 

Cage's music is perhaps more universal because it doesn't call on any special training or artistic awareness. It brings the listener into the moment. Perhaps I don't appreciate it as much in 2013 because entire industries now thrive on getting us into the moment through Yoga, meditation, travel, aromatherapy, new age music, massage, etc.  Maybe we have people like Cage to thank, and that's great. But music, the performing of notes on paper for an audience in a room, is a fragile wonderful tradition that must be preserved, curated and continued. 

Appreciating Boulez

  I've spent the last year writing twelve tone music. The main thing I learned was that abstract music wants to be abstract. Pierre Boulez was right. 

  I believe that music is (at least) a three field gestalt. The pitch field, time field, and volume fields, working together, intensify the effectiveness of music geometrically.  By pitch field, I include the traditional concepts of melody and harmony; by time field, I include the traditional concepts of rhythm, meter, and overall formal structure; by amplitude, I include traditional notions of timbre and dynamics, which technically involve varying the amplitude of certain overtones and noises as the music progresses. A mode, or style, of music combines characteristic means of managing these three fields:  gregorian chant combines pitches from white-key scales with regular, phrase-based rhythms and choral timbres modulated by reverb; a Mariachi band combines simple germanic folk harmonies with regular waltz and polka rhythms in 2-3 minute song forms, enigmatically played on guitars, trumpets, and violins and sung in Spanish by old men. Both modes tweak the three fields in just the right way.

  In traditional classical music modes, the best music is made when the right notes are played at the right time with the right expressive qualities, including timbre. Those are the moments when the music transcends what is written on the page and becomes a spiritual exploration, a heartwarming moment, or an exciting rush. The more sophisticated the music, the more powerful these moments are. 

  Pierre Boulez famously said two things: first, that any composer who does feel the validity of serialism is useless, and, later, that "Schoenberg is dead" (when he wasn't yet)(meaning his musical approach was useless). I used to write off these statements as grandstanding, but I think I get it now.  The first statement was one of artistic joy - he realized that serialism was the way forward in exploring meaning through music. At the start of the 20th century, musicians had thoroughly explored the heart through romantic-era tonal music. Extensions of the major-minor diatonic system had run their course as well: church mode tonalities, substitute chords and whole-tone textures, noise compositions, virtuosity. The field was dry. Serialism broke through the logjam and offered a way forward. Boulez was saying, the future is the future and the past is past - get on board, this is exciting. I've been to the mountain top, I've seen the promised land - we are free at last. 

   I give Boulez credit, not just because he is a conductor and master musician, but because he wrote very good serialism, especially Le Marteau Sans Maitre. I am able to comprehend his statement about serialism because I have been writing it and I'm pretty sure I get it. In his view, there is nothing meaningful left to be written in the key of C. The best modern music is going to be abstract, with no key center, and any composer not trying to find ways to write effective abstract music is irrelevant. Serialism is not the only way to manage pitch in an abstract texture, but at the time it was the best way.

   The other statement, that "Schoenberg is dead," also refers to the three-field gestalt. Pitch serialism, which Schoenberg obviously helped formulate, is a game changer. It upsets the three-field gestalt.  The pitch field, entering the abstract realm, transforms the gestalt such that the other fields must catch up. Schoenberg tried to use 12-tone pitch organization with traditional romantic-era rhythmic language. Listening to his music, you can hear it - change the notes to the key of e minor and some of it would resemble Beethoven. 

   Boulez realized that the other two elements of the musical gestalt had to be brought into the abstract realm along with pitch.  He invested a great deal of energy in examining how rhythm might be managed to create meaningful abstract textures. He studied Messiaen's attempts at isorythmic serialism, came up with his own durational time pointing, and re-invented it several times. 

   He has also tried to organize the timbre field in a manner appropriate to abstract music by serializing dynamics, and later, studying spectral graphs of complex timbres and deriving harmony from them. Most serial composers concluded that most effective textures happened when register was frequently displaced, quick-attack-short-decay ringing timbres were used.  These timbres complimented the asymmetric rhythms and abstract harmony. 

   You have to go "all in" with abstract music.  You can't use twelve tone techniques with romantic rhythmic language, using textures from the New World Symphony.  If you do, it just sounds like wrong notes. I believe that Schoenberg spent a lot of energy forcing his new wine into old skins - trying to become the abstract Beethoven. Boulez, I think, loved Schoenberg's music so much that he hated to see him go in this direction. 

   The upshot of all of this is that the pieces I wrote in May, June and July failed because they didn't go all in.  I tried to fit 12 tone pitch organization into 19th century time and timbre conventions. The result sounds like wrong notes. It sounds ugly and out of place. A Fugue doesn't want to be abstract.  A Tango doesn't want to be abstract. It's not abstract; it's a charming, sensuous dance with a regular repeating harmony reinforced by a fetching, undulating rhythm. Who in their right mind would mess with that? Me. 

   Sophisticated music reinforces its own effectiveness geometrically when all three fields, frequency, time and amplitude, are managed in a self-referential abstract manner. It's not easy to write.  It's not supposed to be. It takes a Boulez, a Babbitt, a Carter, a Wuorinen to do it well.

   When you consciously decide to avoid the difficulty by ignoring the pitch field, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Music that uses only noises and no pitches (Xanakis) is not the best it can be; neither is music that just explores the timbre of static pitches or licks (Grisey, minimalism) or music that makes pitches capricious or aleatoric (Cage). The composer's job in the modern era is the same as it has always been: to co-ordinate all three fields, pitch, rhythm and timbre, by any means necessary until the music transcends what is written on the page and becomes a spiritual exploration, a heartwarming moment, or an exciting rush.  Those moments no longer happen in classical music by channeling Schubert. It's over. Serialism might not be the final, best answer, but I think it has me moving in the right direction.

 

Wuorinen research paper: Bamboula Squared / New York Notes

Here is a paper I wrote at GSU:

Integration of Computer-Composed Music in Wuorinen’s 

New York Notes and Bamboula Squared

   Charles Peter Wuorinen (1938- ) has established himself as a preeminent American composer of serious art music.(1) His works are almost exclusively written for traditional instruments using twelve-tone techniques. Of his few forays into electronic music, Time’s Encomium (1969), New York Notes (1982) and Bamboula Squared (1984) stand out as significant contributions to the electronic music genre. In the latter two works, the same computer-generated music is used to supplement different live ensembles; a “Pierrot ensemble” in the case of New York Notes(2), and a full orchestra in the case of Bamboula Squared. The choices Wuorinen made with respect to the role of the computer, the role of randomness, the algorithm used to generate pitches and rhythms by the computer, the timbre of the synthesized sound, and the placement of the sound blocks into the musical score are novel, but consistent with the philosophy of musical narrative he has espoused throughout his career and the techniques he has consistently employed in writing non-electronic music.

Electronic-plus-acoustic Music in the 1980s
   Electronic Music has been the classical composer’s “frenemy” since the mid-twentieth century. On the one hand, synthesizers and computers allow for infinite variation of pitches, rhythms and tone colors, offering a rich palette for individual expression. On the other hand, “taped” compositions eliminate live performance, traditionally the focal point of meaningful musical communication. One answer to the latter problem is to integrate electronic sounds into a live performance featuring traditional performers on standard instruments. Electronic-plus- acoustic had become an attractive option for composers by the 1980’s.
   Computers replaced tape recorders as the means of creating electronic music some time in the 1960’s; however, there were no affordable, portable computers available to the average composer until the late 1990’s. In the 1970’s and 80’s, when Wuorinen was active in electronic music, one had to have access to a leading university with a computer music laboratory.(3) Electronic music was usually realized in the computer lab and recorded onto reel-to-reel recording tape. During performance, an operator would start and stop the tape machine, which was amplified by a sound system of one or more channels. Many composers used stereo systems to reproduce different sounds from each of two speakers during performance. Quadrophonic sound was occasionally used to separate discreet electronic sound sources even further. Sound systems of the quality required for full, accurate presentation of the nuances of the recorded sounds were rarely available, however, and composers rarely had professional help in setting them up and balancing the sound.

   Several purely artistic problems present themselves in this context as well. First, that of synchronization. Electroacoustic music, traditionally precomposed and recorded onto tape or digital media, must be played back during performance, with no live manipulation of playback speed (tempo). The composer must decide, as part of the compositional design, whether the synthesized parts must line up temporally with the live instruments, or whether they will synchronize only approximately. The tape-plus-one compositions of Milton Babbitt(4) and Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms series(5) represent the first type: music that consists of a player or players “keeping up” with a prerecorded electroacoustic part. Karlheinz Stockhausen has written pieces of the second type, where the electronic parts are not intended to line up with the meter of the live performance.(6)
   No clear trend has emerged. Good players do not enjoy playing in a robotic fashion without the micro-fluctuations in tempo that make their playing expressive. Good composers do not enjoy loosely connected elements in their compositions. Today’s composers seem to have given up on synchronization, preferring live instruments that drive preset computer sounds in real time.(7)

   A second problem with electroacoustic music is tuning. Synthesizers can use “scales” of 24, 31 or microtonal scales of hundreds of notes. The integration of traditional instruments limits this capability, unless the composer finds a way to make Western tempered tuning combine pleasantly with the artificial “mode.”
   When electronic sounds are played back live, there are also issues of balance to be overcome. Sitting in an electronic music studio, a composer can only guess how the sounds he or she is creating will blend with the instruments when played back live. Every hall has unique acoustics. Every audio playback system has unique reproductive capabilities. The effectiveness of the overall sound is often left to chance.
   When electronic-plus-acoustic music overcomes these obstacles, it is often exciting and original: the audience gets the benefit of a compelling live performance along with the novel, modern sounds produced through electronic music synthesis.

Wuorinen, Bamboula Squared, and New York Notes
   Charles Wuorinen developed an interest in in the work of Benoit Mandelbrot in the 1970s and 1980s. Mandelbrot (1924-2010) was a French-American mathematician who coined the 

term “fractal” to describe certain properties of non-smooth objects.(8) Mathematically, a fractal is a never-ending pattern that repeats itself at different scales; this property is called “self- similarity.” Although fractals result in very complex patterns, they are made by repeating a very simple process. Fractals are found in nature, in the branching patterns of trees, rivers networks, lightning bolts, and the spiraling patterns of seashells, hurricanes, and galaxies. Mathematical fractals are formed by calculating a simple equation thousands of times, feeding the answer back into the formula. When converted into a graph, the patterns are complex and self-nesting, meaning one can “zoom in” forever. Fractal diagrams tell the story of the process that created it.
   Wuorinen believes that music is “intrinsically fractal.” What he generally means by this is that, in well-composed music, the same kinds of things tend to happen in the large scale as in the small.(9) Translated into musical terminology, this meant, for Wuorinen, that the twelve-tone row utilized to generate source material for the actual notes on the pages of the score is also used as a basis for the durational design, or form, of the piece as a whole. To differing degrees, his music utilizes intervals of time analogous to the pitch intervals defining the twelve-tone series.(10) Since it does so on several scales (overall piece, individual movements, passages within movements, down to phrases and sometimes lines of melody) the music is said to be “nesting” and fractal in nature.
   While experimenting with 1/f randomness with Mark Lieberman at Bell Labs in the 1970s, Wuorinen concluded that processing the randomness with twelve-tone compositional methods resulted in music that sounded “composed.” In other words, this set of values (essentially a string of numbers) was unique in that it could be used to “create” patterns that mimicked the contours and rhythms of contemporary twelve-tone music.

   New York Notes was written in Lubbock, Texas in 1981-82(11) for flute, clarinet in A, violin, cello, piano and two percussionists, a modified Pierrot ensemble. It is a 20-25 minute piece in three movements of roughly equal length.(12) The movements bear no descriptive subtitles; the tempi are 80, 40 and 160 beats per minute.
   In 1984, years after completing New York Notes, Wuorinen was in residence at the University of California San Diego’s Center for Music Experiment (CME), completing what would become the computer-generated tape portion of Bamboula Squared and later New York Notes. utilizing the resources of UCSD’s Computer Audio Research Lab (CARL). It was there that he worked with Lee Ray(13) to integrate fractal geometry into computer music. Bamboula Squared was completed as part of this residency by re-arranging the first and third movements of New York Notes for orchestra and then adding in ten snippets of computer-generated “fractal music.”

   After the success of Bamboula Squared,(14) Wuorinen went back and retro-fitted the synthesized music generated in San Diego onto the original New York Notes in 1988. The cues for the electronic parts are the same as in Bamboula Squared, thus, the second movement of New York Notes has no tape part.

Wuorinen's Methods of Composition
   While the computer music was generated using random noise, the instrumental parts for New York Notes do not involve anything close to randomness or improvisation.(15) Wuorinen composes using twelve-tone techniques, outlined in his 1979 book Simple Composition. In twelve-tone writing, an abstract sense of harmony and melody is achieved by using an aggregate set of the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale in a unique order. This order is maintained in order to obfuscate the sense of tonality and establish abstract voice leading “rules.” Permutations of the row are frequently used, such as the inverted version, the retrograde version, and the inverted retrograde version. Transpositions of the row may be freely used, resulting in a set of 48 forms to choose from.
In order to achieve organically related abstract rhythmic textures, Wuorinen sometimes employed “time points.”(16) This term was coined by Milton Babbitt in 1962.(17) The time point method starts with a basic unit of musical duration, say, a sixteenth note. the pitches in the twelve tone row are then assigned numbers instead of letters. The numbers are used to set the attack points of the melody: an F-natural, or 5, would get 5 sixteenth notes, and if the next pitch in the row were an A-flat, the next attack point would be eight sixteenth notes later. The notes in the melodic line would not have to be held the whole time, but they may.

   Time points can be used as the duration superstructure of the work by dividing the entire running time of a piece or movement according to the same ratio expressed by the numeric version of the tone-row. Individual sections thus created can be further divided by the same ratio, “nesting” the time point series within itself.
   Wuorinen also managed the pitch centricity of his music using time points. Within an abstract harmonic texture, a pitch may nonetheless be emphasized without losing the non-tonal character of the music. This may be done through repetition, registral placement, dynamics, or orchestration (timbre). Wuorinen achieves a flow in his music by moving away from and toward new pitch centers, sometimes between “chords” of two or more pitch classes.
Wuorinen avoids the term “serialism”:

“I’ve never accepted the word ‘serial’ because, for me, it’s like the word ‘atonal,’ which should be only used historically to describe a certain repertoire: the pre-twelve-tone chromatic music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern . . . ‘Serial’ likewise, to me, means the sort of automatic program music written by Europeans, mostly in the ‘50s and a little bit into the ‘60s—stuff which, if you take one look at how they put it together, couldn’t possibly survive. It was completely arbitrary, and they had basically no control over the outcome. . . The phrase “twelve-tone,” on the other hand, is accurate in the sense that it assumes the use of the total chromatic (maybe segregated into collections of less every once in a while), and that it is based on ordered sets (usually involving all of the twelve elements, sometimes more, and sometimes less). Whatever nasty connotations it has had slathered onto it by mean- spirited critics and insecure composers, that is a designation I’m happy to accept.(18)

   Labels such as “serialism” and atonal paint an over-simplified picture of Wuorinen’s music works, but it is safe to say that his music resembles, in texture and gesture, that of Arnold Schoenberg more than of his contemporaries Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter.(19) While he, like Babbitt and Carter, employs serious pre-compositional planning, the designated superstructure does not seem to dominate the actual note-by-note writing. Melody and counterpoint are paramount: once the overall parameters of the piece are mapped out, the details are turned over to Wuorinen’s highly sophisticated musical judgment and heartfelt expression.
   Wuorinen, like Babbitt, derived secondary pitches from the original row forms by multiplication and other methods of transformation before utilizing the pitches in the written music,(20) so it would be futile to attempt a “twelve count” of the resulting score. One can be assured that twelve tone techniques were utilized to achieve an abstract harmonic style, and that the selection of pitch classes is progressing in a controlled manner.

Generation of the Computer Composed Blocks
   Wuorinen worked with Lee Ray at CARL to “teach” a computer to write twelve tone music using time points. Their basic approach was to start with random noise and keep applying filters and formulae until it became useful music.
   Noise in synthesis is generally the output of speakers fed with all of the audible frequencies. White noise is all of the frequencies at an equal power to each frequency Pink noise is all of the frequencies at equal power per octave. To a computer, noise is not even sound - it is simply a series of values that can be output over time. 1/f noise is a special selection of quasi-random values that, when plotted, mimics the contours of music plotted in the same way.(21) Wuorinen and Ray chose this source of noise hoping it would more readily become effective music.

1/f variations, when plotted as frequency versus time, are a random signal, a type of noise, and are representative of the behavior over time of many systems in nature; this intrigues Wuorinen. That such variation is typical of music as different as Bach and rock excited his interest in using such variations in his own automatic and computer-aided compositional activities.(22)

  The first filter they used eliminated all of the frequencies that people cannot hear. Then they forced the computer to consider only the notes of the chromatic scale by filtering the noise source at divisions of 1/12 of every octave. At this point, the machine presented itself with a very large chromatic scale of notes to “improvise” with.

I wanted to be in total control of the instrumental writing and so the computer plays no part in it. As for the tape, I make no specific pitch or rhythmic choices, but the algorithm by which the computer makes its choices had been thoroughly tested and modified until it produced results which were of the class and nature that I wanted. There are many instances of music old and new, Eastern and Western,in which choices are made spontaneously by human performers. Here is simply a transference of what some might say is a very modest application of artificial intelligence.(23)

   Wuorinen then had Ray write a cmusic(24) program that filtered the output of the note- generation program with musical rules for note successions and simultanaeities, “instructing” the computer to employ a twelve tone row and keep to certain rules of twelve tone writing. The algorithm was further altered to have the computer create time points using the same row. It then was ready to assign “rhythms” to the “notes.” Curiously, the twelve-tone row used in the algorithm was unrelated to the row used in writing the instrumental parts of New York Notes.(25)
   In order to give the music direction, however, Wuorinen designated “trend lines” for the computer to follow. Each trend line began on one pitch of a one-four note “chord” and ended on one pitch of a later chord. The “chords” were taken from the existing music of New York Notes, so that the computer was playing along with the instruments as they progressed from one point in the music to another.
   One of the properties of using 1/f noise is self-similarity. The algorithm creating the pitches and rhythms is filling in a fractal design over time, and can be as recursive, as “nesting” as one desires:

An hypothesis is that the interpolations [of the computer music in Bamboula Squared] differ in kind from those made by note- by-note algorithms or applications of other probability distribution functions because of the property of self-similarity which is a distinctive feature of sequences generated by 1/f means. Rather in the fashion of a hologram the distinctive contour of a sequence is present from the very first selection of interpolated breakpoints and is revealed in greater and greater detail as more and more breakpoints are chosen.(26)

   The actual sound of the computer music was a simulated string pluck developed by another researcher at UCSD, Mark Dolson.(27) At Wuorinen’s direction, it featured a synthesized string pluck with a slight glissando.(28) Almost all of the synthesized parts use this same patch in the final music. As such, most of the synthesized notes are short.
   The actual execution of the tape part involved starting and stopping the blocks of sound on cue by lining up paper leader tape on the playback head of the reel-to-reel tape player.(29) The operator had to be a trained musician in order to follow the score and start the tape at the right times.

Placement of the Blocks in the Music
   Wuorinen and Ray created ten blocks of sound to be used in Bamboula Squared. In the first movement, the initial entrance of the computer music is at the two minute mark, after a prelude-like opening passage that introduces the instruments in a slow building crescendo. The 60-second computer part is low, chaotic, fast and dramatic, setting off a frenzy of counterpoint among the instruments. The next block comes in at 3:35 and lasts approximately 30 seconds. A metered, 4/4 section follows with more dense counterpoint in the instruments. A brief synthesized block follows at 4:45, setting off another agitated Allegro section. At 5:40, the electronics enter in a raindrop-like gathering rhythm, with the timbre of the notes softened somewhat. At 6:30, the first longer notes are heard from the computer music, blending with the winds and eventually taking over the piece. The first movement ends with a “cadenza” for the computer that features a variety of voices building in intensity, speed of attacks, and harmonic density. Lee Ray refers to this section as one of two recursive blocks,(30) wherein the computer generated music based on the output of its own algorithm. This is fractal music, organically generating its own nested variations. The sound seems to grow like a building cloud or gathering storm.
   The third movement first sees synthesized music at 1:10, where there are twenty seconds or so of contrasting sounds, completely unsynchronized with the instruments. Another “raindrop” style entry of electronics occurs around the two minute mark. The writing is very effective for the next two minutes, with driving rhythms in the instruments energetically playing off of each other in hemiola and eventually coming together tutti at around 4:45, when the electronics return. This block is set against timpani in what sounds like quintuplets against sixteenth notes. By the five minute mark the electronics are together with the instruments, which is over by 5:10 when the computer music quits and the ensemble goes from virtuosic rapid passages to a slower section at 5:23. After a tutti at six minutes, we get our first octave doubling, and a general buildup of tension. At 6:30 the electronics enter on a piano note “cue” in another “raindrop” style entrance. A big buildup starts at the seven minute mark; this is the second self-regenerating section of computer composed music. The entire ensemble combines in a chaotic mass of sound that dies away after a minute or so, whereupon the instruments echo the excitement with soft patterns in quarter notes. The piece ends with a timpani flourish followed by a long, low “filter sweep” synthesizer note.

Wuorinen's Philosophy of Organizing Principles
   The choices Wuorinen made in integrating electronics into his instrumental music reflect his philosophy of constructing musical drama. The idea of ornamenting trend lines, reflected in the algorithm developed at UCSD, is a feature of Wuorinen’s writing in general. Flow, or a sense of narrative, is basic to his creative approach. His view is that the organizing principle of a piece is more important than the material being organized, and he maintains that this has been true for all western classical music.

I would say that the most fundamental connection I have with the musical past is a sound belief in narrative form, which I try to express, obviously, in different ways than anyone in the 19th century or any of the composers earlier would have done. [I] remain convinced that this is the ground of our entire civilization. There are other parts of the world, other cultures —very great ones—that don’t necessarily operate that way; they may have a cyclical view of time, and so forth and so on, but everything in the West is a story of some sort or another, it seems to me. We assign a definite beginning to the universe—our literature, all of our artistic traditions, and of course our music, are all teleological, goal-directed, or directed in some way so that one returns to a starting point. I’ve never given that up.(31)

   The idea of ornamenting directional trend lines, reflected in the algorithm developed at UCSD for Bamboula Squared, is therefore a feature of Wuorinen’s writing in general. Wuorinen believed that the computer-composed music blocks “organically” connected the beginning and ending sonorities, adding to the overall narrative flow of the music. This, despite the lack of metric synchronization between the live score and the tape part, and the lack of any relationship between the tone rows used for the tape part and the instrument parts. The goal was to enhance the overall line of the piece using an accompanying fractal overlay relying on the intrinsic fractal nature of music as the sole unifying factor.
   The blending of the orchestra and synthesizer in the final movement of Bamboula Squared produces a completely novel and fascinating effect. No orchestra alone could match it. The regenerative “cadenza-like” sections clearly add drama to the climactic portions, and the remaining blocks blend in with the larger ensemble, adding mysterious timbres that intrigue the listener. Nothing seems “covered up” by the electronics, which lend an organic, unfolding urgency to the points in the score where they are inserted.
   When added to New York Notes, however, the synthesized portions are exposed more and seem to obscure the instruments on occasion.(32) They sound foreign, sometimes jarringly so. The impression one gets is that of a contrast of natural and unnatural elements, some kind of intruding force in an otherwise natural landscape. The combination of competing textures evokes the dualities of New York City: extreme wealth and poverty, optimistic energy and drab despair, the world’s most sophisticated high art and its grossest pornography, its brilliance and ignorance, Charity and Avarice.

Conclusion
   Wuorinen employed a unique manner of synchronizing computer-generated music with live performance in Bamboula Squared. Precise synchronization with the instrumental parts was eschewed in favor of the electronics acting as externally consistent connecting material between existing points in the instrumental score. The beginning and end of each block of computer music was synchronized, but not the notes in between. This is an odd approach for a composer so adept at counterpoint, and particular about rhythmic detail; however, in this piece, highlighting the fractal music took precedence over strict synchronicity. In theory, the underlying instrumental music, being intrinsically fractal in nature, is therefore related to the overlying computer music in spirit, if not directly on the surface.(33)
   It is doubtful that other composers will follow Wuorinen’s lead in the use of computer algorithms to generate self-similar music. First, because few contemporary computer musicians employ twelve-tone techniques. Second, because few composers have shown any interest in fractals, which is unfortunate.
   The computer generated sections may have seemed less foreign in “New York Notes” had Wuorinen used related tone rows in the electronic and instrumental parts. The rhythmic textures were also disparate, due to the electronic sections being “time-pointed” and the instrumental parts written without the use of time points.(34) Finally, the timbres used in the computer-composed sections were largely static, as was (for the most part) the dynamic level of the synthesized notes.(35) Wuorinen was no doubt more concerned with the way the pitches and rhythms self-generated at the time; his music is generally meticulous with respect to articulation and dynamics. A blending of timbres, or a more varied timbral palette may have enhanced the drama of the combined instrumental-synthsizer musical gestures.

   In general, it may be said that the integration of the computer generated music in Bamboula Squared represented a successful attempt to demonstrate certain fractal characteristics of music. The electronic blocks are not “window dressing” - they are not incidental timbral enhancements of the gestures written for the acoustic instruments. Neither are they, however, essential parts of the score, which indicates that the tape part is optional.(36) They are unique additions to an otherwise complete work of art.

   Wuorinen’s thinking about synchronization went deeper than simply deciding whether or not to “line up the beats.” His choices reveal the thinking of a composer ever mindful of the relationship between the large and small in a major musical work, careful to give every note purpose and direction. The concept of connecting two harmonic resting points with purposeful music was as important to Bach as it is to Wuorinen. In building an algorithm to accomplish this feat, Wuorinen stands as an inspiration to all who compose electronic music to make use of artificial intelligence in partnering with computers in the future.(37) 

*****

¹ Wuorinen lives in New York, and, in his mid-70s, remains active as a composer. He began college at  Columbia in 1961 and taught there after attaining his Masters degree.  He also held teaching posts at the Manhattan School of Music, and at Rutgers (State University of New Jersey). In 1962 he was one of the founders of the influential Group for Contemporary Music. He has written more than 200 compositions—including works for electronic media alone and with traditional instruments—for orchestra, chamber group, ballet, opera, chorus, and soloists. Among his best known pieces are Time's Encomium (1969), an electronic piece that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1970; Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky (1975), based on Stravinsky's last sketches; Bamboula Squared (1984), for orchestra and computer-generated sound; the Dante Trilogy (1993–96), orchestral scores written for the New York City Ballet; and the opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories (2005), adapted from the novel by Salman Rushdie. Composer in residence at the San Francisco Symphony (1985–89) and a guest piano soloist and conductor with many orchestras worldwide, Wuorinen has been the recipient of many awards, including Guggenheim (1968,1972) and MacArthur (1986–91) fellowships. Wuorinen authored Simple Composition (New York: C.F.Peters, 1979, repr. 1994), an important textbook on modern composition. Burbank, Richard, Charles Wuorinen - A Bio-Bibliography, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 1-9. See also, Carucci, Jason and Karchin, Louis, “Wuorinen, Charles (Peter),” In Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/49826?q=wuorinen&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit (accessed November 4, 2012).

² The “Pierrot Ensemble” is a quintet of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, frequently augmented by a singer or percussionist, or by having the instrumentalists double on related instruments. It is named for Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire (Op. 12, 1921), which featured the quintet plus a mezzo soprano, and has become the standard instrumentation of many contemporary classical ensembles, such as Eighth Blackbird and the New York New Music Ensemble.

³ Wuorinen worked at several facilities, notably the Columbia-Princeton lab, Bell Labs in New Jersey, and the Computer Audio Research Lab (CARL) in San Diego. 

⁴ Examples include Philomel, for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized tape (1964), Phonemena for soprano and synthesized tape (1969), Reflections for piano and synthesized tape (1975), and Images for saxophone and synthesized tape (1979). 

⁵ Davidovsky has written twelve pieces for soloists and prerecorded electronic sounds: Synchronisms no. 1 (flute, 1962), Synchronisms no. 2 (flute, vn. clar., cello, 1964), Synchronisms no. 3 (cello, 1964), Synchronisms no. 4 (chorus, 1966), Synchronisms no. 5 (percussion, 1969), Synchronisms no. 6 (piano, 1970, a Pulitzer Prize winner), Synchronisms no. 7 (orchestra, 1974), Synchronisms no. 8 (woodwind quintet, 1974), Synchronisms no. 9 (violin, 1988), Synchronisms no. 10 (guitar, 1992), Synchronisms no. 11 (double bass, 2005), and Synchronisms no. 12 (clarinet, 2006).

⁶ An example would be Kontakt (1960) for percussionist, piano, and tape.

⁷ Composers everywhere are processing live miked or electrified instruments using sound-modifying software on a laptop during performance. Performers like Zoe Keating focus on processing their own instruments while playing. The software program Abelton Live has become a standard tool for live manipulation of electronic sounds. Many universities, including the Georgia Institute of Technology, have specialized labs for computer music that focus on integrating live performers and even audiences into computer based music. 

⁸ Mandelbrot believed that fractals, far from being unnatural, were in many ways more intuitive and natural than the artificially smooth abstract objects of traditional Euclidean geometry: “Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”  Mandelbrot, Benoit, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, (New York: W.H.Freeman, 1982).

⁹ “It occurred to me that this is the basic characteristic of music and that it is, in fact, proved that in well-composed music the same kinds of things tend to happen in the large as in the small.”  Wuorinen, Charles  in Burbank, Charles Wuorinen: A Bio-bibliography, supra, p. 14.

¹⁰ See discussion of time points, infra p. 8.

¹¹ See infra, p. 10 and note 22.

¹²  New York Notes was premiered in Sacramento, CA on November 8, 1982, Robert Black, conducting the New York New Music Ensemble. The piece was not premiered with the tape part until June 21, 1988 by the Chamber Music Society of New York at Lincoln Center under the baton of Fred Sherry. Performances of the piece were later filmed for national broadcast as part of the PBS “Works in Progress” series.  Visual presentations featuring fractal designs and natural fractal patterns have also accompanied the work.  Burbank, Charles Wuorinen- A Bio-Bibliography, supra, p. 60.

¹³ “New York Notes was written during 1981 and 1982 in response to a commission from the New York New Music Ensemble, to whom it is dedicated. Its twenty minute length is divided into a conventional three-movement succession, with fast movements outside and a slow movement inside. The tempo, however, is always the same, so that the differing speeds contained in the work are all expressed through note-value alterations rather than pulse changes. The six members of the ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion) are all engaged in virtuoso play, but I also think of their music as comprising three duets of the related pairs of instruments, as well as six solos.” Charles Wuorinen, In Compositions, http://www.charleswuorinen.com, accessed November 22, 2012.

¹⁴ Ray, Lee, An Application of Computer-Aided Composition within an Independent Musical Context, (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California San Diego, 1987).  Mr. Ray wrote his dissertation on the creation of the tape part for Bamboula Squared, which is archived at the Univ. of California San Diego.  A portion of the thesis may be found on the Wuorinen official website, www.charleswuorinen.com.   

¹⁵ Bamboula Squared was premiered in New York on June 4, 1984 at Lincoln Center, with Wuorinen conducting the American Composers Orchestra.

¹⁶ “The tape part is the only aspect of the work that engages itself in the invocation of randomness. It uses a 1/f noise process for the selection of both the pitch content and the set of attack times. The intent, in part, is to create an intersection between the world of Western traditional musical values and certain modes and forms of natural behavior.” Wuorinen, quoted in Boulanger, Richard, “Interview with Roger Reynolds, Joji Yuasa, and Charles Wuorinen,” Computer Music Journal, vol. 8, no. 4 (Winter 1984) pp. 45-54.

¹⁷ Wuorinen, Charles, Simple Composition, (New York: C.F. Peters, 1979).

¹⁸ Wuorinen, Simple Composition, supra, chs. 10 and 12.  In his book,  Wuorinen’s describes his use of time points in both surface rhythms and overall form.

¹⁹ Babbitt, Milton, "Twelve-tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium", Perspectives of New Music 1, no. 1 (Fall 1962).

²⁰ Wuorinen, Charles, in a 2007 interview with Frank Oteri for the online blog New Music Box.  Oteri, Frank,  “Art and Entertainment,” in New Music Box,  http://www.newmusicbox.org (accessed November 22, 2012).

²¹ “Wuorinen's music is uniquely serial, and primarily 12-tone in nature. His major influences are the modernist European school, namely Schoenberg, though the influence of late Stravinsky and Babbitt are also unmistakable. Much of his music requires extreme virtuosity on the part of the performer, such as his Chamber Concertos, which typically include wide leaps, extreme dynamic contrasts, and a rapid exchange of pitches.Wuorinen's later music begins to demonstrate tonal relationships, though to a limited degree, such as pitch-centered openings and conclusions, octave doublings, and timbral transpositions of thematic ideas. His music also evolved to include clear rhythmic relationships -- his earlier works avoided this characteristic -- and his melodies also became more conjunct in nature. Wuorinen's music continues to evolve, with later works such as the Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra and New York Notes containing further rhythmic clarity, more recognizable melodic structures and clearer orchestration. Clearly this is not the style of the same composer as was found in his earlier works.” biography, in “Charles Wuorinen,” at http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Name/Charles-Wuorinen/Composer/13236-1, accessed November 22, 2012.

²² See, Wuorinen, Simple Composition, supra, chapter 8, p. 98. Also, Oteri, “Art and Entertainment,” supra. (“[I]f you went hunting in any of my works for the last, at least quarter century, looking for the row, you’re going to have a very hard time.”)

²³ “1/f noise is noise in which the magnitude of a given frequency's presence in the noise signal is inversely proportional to the frequency itself. Lower frequencies are favored relative to higher ones and equal power is present in every octave of noise rather than for every frequency. With 1/f noise, in general, smaller changes are more likely than large ones. Large ones are not impossible, but the larger they are the less likely they are to occur. For events which follow one another in time this can give a semblance of smooth change of the sort found in music composed in other ways (whether formalized or not).” Ray, Lee, “An Application of Computer-Aided Composition within an Independent Musical Context” supra, p.19.

²⁴ Id., p. 20.

²⁵ Wuorinen, quoted in Boulanger, “Interview with Roger Reynolds, Joji Yuasa, and Charles Wuorinen,” supra, at p. 52

²⁶ “cmusic” is an acoustic compiler program written by F. Richard Moore as part of the Computer Audio Research Laboratory (CARL) software distribution.  Moore, F. Richard, "The Computer Audio Research Laboratory at UCSD", Computer Music Journal, v.6, n. 1, 1982.

²⁷ Personal conversation with Charles Wuorinen, November 6, 2012.

²⁸ Ray, Lee, “An Application of Computer-Aided Composition within an Independent Musical Context,” supra, p. 27.

²⁹ For a detailed description of the generation of the plucked string algorithm created for Bamboula Squared, see Ray, 
Lee, “An Application of Computer-Aided Composition within an Independent Musical Context,” supra, p. 24

³⁰ Reviewer James Lee characterized this sound as “dulcimer-like.”  Lee, James, “New York Notes for Chamber Ensemble,” in Charles Wuorinen, http://www.allmusic.com/composition/new-york-notes-for-chamber-ensemble-mc0002379733 (accessed November 22, 2012)

³¹ “The tape was constructed so that the sections of music were separated by blank paper leader. In order to insure synchrony of playback for each section, each section of tape was silently brought to its beginning and then, at the proper moment, sounded by activating the ‘play’ mode of the tape machine. Thus each ‘cue’ can be viewed as a single, though complex, event which is prompted by a cue found in the score and given by the conductor and precipitated by a single gesture. As performance then, this method of playing the CAC-music differs in length and complexity but not in kind from a percussionist's performance.” Ray, Lee, “An Application of Computer-Aided Composition within an Independent Musical Context,” supra, p.18.

³² “Recursive iterations of the new-note-generation process were used for only two blocks, [numbers] 5 and 9. In the case of 5 there were three levels of recursion; in 9, seven.”  Ray, Lee, “An Application of Computer-Aided Composition within an Independent Musical Context,” supra, p. 23.

³³ Oteri, “Art and Entertainment,” supra (emphasis supplied).

³⁴ At least one conductor of New York Notes, Anthony Cornicello, a former student of Wuorinen, has opined that “Sonically, [the tape part] kind of stands out: [it] doesn't really blend in with the instruments, but it does provide a nice contrast.  I think the interlude between movements I and II is fantastic.  There are a few spots where it covers up some really good writing, particularly towards the end of the piece.” Private email from Anthony Cornicello, November 4, 2012.

³⁵ Wuorinen espouses the theory that music created by computer using fractal-like patterns is a feature of nature. Fractal music, however, would thus be more of a reflection of natural, purposeless entropy than a communicative or narrative act.  Most observers, including Wuorinen, describe Western art music as essentially narrative (see note 31 supra).  Wuorinen strongly identifies with the Western art tradition rather than with any Eastern philosophy of music. This paradox may explain why neither Wuorinen nor other composers continued writing fractal music using self-generating computer programs after Bamboula Squared. Wuorinen maintains a keen interest in someone completing further research in the area of fractals and music. Burbank, Charles Wuorinen - A Bio-Bibliography, supra, p. 15.  

³⁶ Critics have sensed a “softening” of Wuorinen’s rhythmic language over the years, away from time point generation, citing the composer’s stated goal of reconciling his music with that of the common practice era.  When asked about it in 1987, Wuorinen “flatly stated that his underlying structural and procedural concerns remain precisely the same as they have been over a considerably long stretch of his output: namely the establishment of a piece-long general structure involving, both in pitch and in time, a single twelve-tone set that influences, again in pitch and time, and in ways that vary from piece to piece and certainly vary from classical twelve-tone practice, the course and detail of the piece at all levels.” Kresky, Jeffrey, “The Recent Music of Charles Wuorinen,” Perspective of New Music, vol 25, No. 1/2 (Winter-Summer 1987), pp. 410-417.  Wuorinen told the author in a private phone conversation on November 6, 2012 that he did not use time points to write the instrumental parts to New York Notes. 

³⁷ According to Lee Ray, “It was anticipated that the computer-composed music would be somewhat new in manner and content. An overlay of timbral novelty might have clouded the salience of that music by compounding the uncertainties of both style and substance. Scientific experimental procedure typically requires that all aspects of the behavior of a system be held constant except for a single dimension of variation in order to unambiguously ascribe to that dimension the power of producing an observed result. Perhaps there can be a similar control in artistic experimentation in which variations of a single factor — in this case the 1/f probabilistically generated music — can be observed for their special effect on the overall work.” Ray, “An Application of Computer-Aided Composition within an Independent Musical Context,” supra, pp. 25-26.

³⁸ Wuorinen, Charles, New York Notes, (New York: C.F.Peters, 1983) indication of “(Optional Tape)” on the title page.  The piece is often performed without the tape.

³⁹ “[The tape part for Bamboula Squared] falls in the domain of artificial intelligence, as it creates situations in which - most emphatically according to my rules, taste, and judgment - a ‘music of nature’ emerges from the mingling of traditional compositional values and approaches with the numerical models of certain [fractal] processes in the natural world.” Wuorinen, Charles, program notes for Bamboula Squared, taken from www.charleswuorinen.com, as accessed 11-22-2012. 

   

Bibliography

Boulanger, Richard.  “Interview with Roger Reynolds, Joji Yuasa, and Charles Wuorinen”  Computer Music Journal  vol. 8, no. 4 (Winter 1984) pp. 45-54.

Burbank, Richard. Charles Wuorinen - A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Carucci, Jason and Karchin, Louis. “Wuorinen, Charles (Peter).” In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,  http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/49826?q=wuorinen&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit. Accessed November 4, 2012.

Kresky, Jeffrey. “The Recent Music of Charles Wuorinen”  Perspective of New Music vol 25, No. 1/2 (Winter-Summer 1987) pp. 410-417.

Mandelbrot, Benoit. The Fractal Geometry of Nature.  New York: W.H.Freeman, 1982.

Moore, F. Richard.  "The Computer Audio Research Laboratory at UCSD" Computer Music Journal v.6, no. 1 (1982).

Oteri, Frank, “Art and Entertainment,” In New Music Box, http://www.newmusicbox.org (July 1, 2007)

Ray, Lee.  “An Application of Computer-Aided Composition within an Independent Musical Context” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at San Diego, 1987)

Wuorinen, Charles. “Bamboula Squared” In Compositions, http://www.CharlesWuorinen.com. Accessed November 22, 2012.

Wuorinen, Charles.  Simple Composition. New York: C.F. Peters, 1979.