Let It Blurt. Or Not. Whatever Happens Happens.

I was recently out for drinks with some old schoolmates of mine from music school. The lot of us had been grads or undergrads studying some kind of experimental music composition.

While nestled amid confusing tiki decor, I had related to me the specs for a recent grad thesis piece in which only the performance's mistakes were audible. I wont share the full layout of how this was done in practice, for proprietary reasons, but let's just say there were computers involved, and a "mistake" was programmed as an unintentional, dynamically louder 'blurt' from the instrument. Everyone at the table agreed that this was a solid conceptual idea (I didn't comment), but in practice, there was a conundrum: if the performer made no mistakes, the piece was inaudible.
Sonically, I'm told, this piece amounted to minutes on end of awkward silence, punctuated by blurts. The conservative members of the group agreed (nodding over a big tiki bowl of rum punch) that it was important that music sound somehow good or interesting, and so determined that the piece had not been successful. I didn't bother asking how this piece could possibly communicate conceptual meaning to a listener without copious program notes. Apparently there were no program notes at all for the piece, which I imagine was a disappointment to anyone in attendance, listening up for blurts, and wishing they had something to stare at to alleviate the boredom, confusion, and anger they must have been feeling.

What merit might be discovered in a piece like this? What drives it? There is something interesting about filtering unintended sounds, and, I guess, exposing performance as a human and accident-prone process. There's also something psychologically interesting about whatever happened to the performer of the piece, if he or she would have consciously or unconsciously tried to make mistakes so the piece could be audible, and if he or she would have fought that urge. But, let's face it, those things are only likely to be interesting to other musicians.

I think the problem can be framed in terms of listener/composer control. I'm reminded of  something Anner Bylsma said about Bach's 'Cello Suites in his book Bach, the Fencing Master. Bylsma talks about the suites as a possible "experiment in music." The possible experiment: how little can a composer say and still imply to a listener a great amount of information? How can one imply four voices when writing for one intrument? One can't include the bass and the melody at the same time, all the time. Bylsma surmises that a single bass note can be remembered by a listener for very long periods of time, while the melody moves on for an entire passage, and that listeners can tell when the bass has resolved. He also thinks a listener can retrospectively imagine an implied bass note when its resolution is heard measures later. In other words, the 'cello suites are like good books: half of it is in your imagination.

In contrast, the avant garde status quo seem much more interested in filling space, in spelling things out, in making concepts clear and above all communicating something. (This seems counter to what postmodernism is supposed to be--god forbid postmodern music communicates!--but bear with me?) The compositional process, at least in the "mistakes" piece, is more about a central concept, which usually stems from the moment in which the piece was conceived (say, making a mistake on the guitar), and communicating that exact experience to a listener somehow.

Ironically, the deconstructivist, concept-driven music process seems to have dumped off into conceptual programmaticism. It's like watching concept TV. The 'mistakes' piece could only make sense to us if we had program notes, and then, we'd just be listening to an exposition of the program notes. We ought to be imagining this inaudible piece, but all we hear is concept, which is spelled out for us in no uncertain terms by the title or notes. There's nothing to spark our imagination, and not a lot of room for interpretation.

All of this implies to me that we just don't trust our listeners to imagine what we haven't expressly spelled out.

This is especially strange considering the avant trends of improv and graphic scores, which supposedly aim to relinquish some of the composer's control. I might hypothesize that some recent use of graphic scoring has more to do with not being able to pay performers to learn through-composed parts, rather than with intentional ideologies of control and authorship. (Bear in mind that I'm talking about new and underfunded/student composers, not John Cage and Anthony Braxton.) In any case, this kind of scoring tends to transfer control away from the composer to the performer. The listener is still passive. Composers get control of the concept, performers get control of the resulting sound, and listeners get dick. What about evoking, rather than force-feeding?