The science of music

WHAT AM I LISTENING TO?!?

That is the first reaction to listening to these pieces. Yes, I’m aware this phrase and its variants thereof has creeped up into various blog posts before, but...what am I supposed to make of this? How can I find some semblance of sense in conceptualism?

In thinking about it, though, like in most things, there is order in chaos.

Conceptualism is a form of composing where “...the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work”. In other words, it is a composition based almost entirely around a single idea or thought. With that in mind, yes it is a form of minimalism.

They can be based on a sole line of dialogue, like Steve Reich’s Come Out to Show ‘Em or James Tenney’s Collage #1 (“Blue Suede”), a tape piece based on Elvis Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes.

I'm not even joking. Look. LOOK.

Then, there are pieces like Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room. What Lucier does in this piece is that he records a bit of dialogue, and then he played that recording back in the same room, re-recording that. The room has a certain frequency and when the recording is played back in the same room, that frequency is picked up again and amplified two-fold, resulting in an increased echo that’s better demonstrated than explained:

This process repeats itself until only the natural harmonies and tones of the room itself can be heard, “...articulated by speech”. And the sounds themselves are quite surreal, almost as though they are the anguished screamings of thousands of guilty souls in the eternal pits of hell.

And on a side note, it’s worth bringing up that Lucier is one letter away from “Lucifer”, but that’s another subject for another day.

Now, to be clear, the intent of this piece is more to, in Lucier’s own words, “...smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.” And he does stutter three times in his original recording. But still, there is a certain science to this piece. I may not be a “scientist”, but I think one may need to know something about the acoustics of a room to know how to do something like this. It transcends its original intent and ends up being a combination of frequency study and vocal transformation that is a science unto itself.

I recognize that the above might simply be a coincidence, but it’s still something worth bringing up.

Of course, the voice is only one way of expressing an idea. There are other means to do so as well. Take the piano, for instance.

Going back to James Tenney, he was a rather unusual composer. Unusual in that he’s a man without a specific genre of music. Some called him a father of Electronic Music, and there are some ways in which that is true. He was one of the first composers for the genre, having composed at Bell Laboratories during the 1960s, ending in 1969 with For Ann(rising). Likewise, others have called him a great minimalist composer. He has performed with the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, not to mention have written for plenty of musical instruments.

Above all, though, he is an experimenter. Every piece is like a science experiment. In the New York Times article about him, Anne Midgette specifically names Ain’t I A Woman as an example of this. Regrettably, a recording is unavailable, so I’ll be brief. The experiment here is to mimic the speech patterns of Sojourner Truth with string instruments. This is done by analyzing the acoustics of speech, and though he admits that he can’t get it exactly right, he still says the results are beyond anything anyone’s ever seen.

Then, there’s his Chromatic Canon for 2 pianos.

It has been described as the love child of Serialism and Minimalism. And that’s not my comparison; after the premiere, Steve Reich jokingly criticized the piece, saying that he was “put in bed with Schoenberg”, entirely the point of the piece. The piece is a virtual battle between Minimalism and Serialism. What starts out as a simple broken Perfect 5th gradually gets taken over by a 12 tone row before going back to a broken Perfect 5th, transposed up 5 semitones. A virtual arc. The idea found in the piece goes back to his personal life. According to Tenney, the tension found between two clashing elements is supposed to simulate the tension between his parents and his desire to bring them together.

It’s a grand experiment, one that, thanks to Tenney’s love of harmony, one that paid off spectacularly. And that’s what science is all about: to experiment, to test new things, to take risks. I say these things running the risk of me sounding like an evangelistic, but in a way: Conceptualists are musical scientists: they experiment, they see what works and what doesn't, and they present their findings to the world to be scrutinized. A bit of a stretch, maybe, but it’s a theory worth looking into.