The Rambler

There’s nowt more prog than Stockhausen. Speaking of whom, some more words on experiential time…

Stockhausen’s idea ran roughly as follows: in a given piece of music, ‘processes of alteration’ follow one another at different speeds. It is these alterations (loud/soft, high/low, short/long) that define musical units and large-scale form. Borrowing (with typically scant regard for technical vocabulary) from information theory Stockhausen suggested that

“The more surprising events take place, the ‘quicker’ time passes; the more repetitions there are, the ’slower’ time passes. But there is surprise only when something unexpected occurs: on the basis of previous events we expect a particular kind of succession of alterations, and then something occurs that is quite unlike what we expected. At that moment we are surprised: our senses are extremely sensitive to absorb the unexpected alteration, to adjust themselves to it. Thus after a short time a constant succession of contrasts becomes just as ‘boring’ as constant repetition: we stop expecting anything specific, and cannot be surprised: the overall impression of contrasts is levelled down to a single information.”

In other words, the musical syntax of a work, as well as the subjective expectations of the listener create patterns of information and redundancy as the music progresses. A musical loop has a very high degree of redundancy, and therefore time feels slower; highly contrasting music passes more quickly because of the greater degree of information being carried. Music that is constantly changing generates the expectation that it will constantly be surprising, with the effect that it starts to become redundant itself, and in fact a few bars of repetition in the middle will become the most information-heavy part of the piece.

As Stockhausen points out, this seems paradoxical: surely musical moments that are more information-heavy will pass more slowly, since there is more mental processing to be done? In fact, what he suggests is the case is that

“The greater the temporal density of unexpected alterations - the information content - the more time we need to grasp events, and the less time we have for reflection, the quicker time passes; the lower the effective density of alteration (not reduced by recollection or the fact that the alterations coincide with our expectations), the less time the senses need to react, so that greater intervals of experiential time lie between the processes, and the slower time passes.”

Which is fine, up to a point. But Stockhausen had never heard Donna Summer or Richie Hawtin so was missing a few things. What really happens, I think, is it’s all about tension. If you start repeating things, or holding back on expectations, you create tension. That’s really what music does better than any of the arts. Just watch an audience at the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the beginning of Penderecki’s Threnody. You can see the tension and the release physically. People can’t help it. Now, as far as experiential time goes, I say it’s like a rollercoaster (yeah, yeah, hackneyed analogy, but go with it…). The repeating ‘dugga dugga dugga dugga’ keyboard loop in ‘I Feel Love’ winds up the tension, because surely it has to be going somewhere, right? (And remember what it was like the first time you heard anything like this!) Time starts to move more slowly, you’re aware of every single pulse. (And Stockhausen had never done E, either, so let’s leave the drugs out of the equation for now…). Until the key change, up a gear - ‘Ooooo, you and me, you and me, you and meee….’ - and the tension goes, you’ve had that change you’ve been waiting for, time flies past you, you lose track of the keyboards - they’ve shifted too, but you don’t have time to listen any more - and the whole lot plunges. And then you’re back. ‘You and me. I feel love…’. Back to the home key, you know where you are, you should be able to relax a little - but that tension’s still there, and now you know where it can go (you’ve got a sense of the syntax), so it’s even more this time around; and pretty soon you’ve stopped counting the beats, stopped feeling the seconds because they’ve fallen away and it’s just that pulse, that ‘ooooOOOO‘ that tells you where in time you are.

And people say disco’s all just about sex…

Phew.

Mid-note to the ongoing repetition/time-travel thang: some lovely words by Brian Marley [reviewing Feldman's Late Works with Clarinet (Mode 119 CD)] in the current Wire:

“One of the characteristics of Morton Feldman’s music is the way silences are thrown into stark relief. Each silence - freighted with memory, charged with expectation - becomes a unique presence in the music more than merely an absence of it. Though his silences are measured in units of time, they also contain an intimation of infinity. The music of the ‘classical’ tradition slows down, speeds up, layers and otherwise manipulates time. Of the other arts, only cinema plays with our temporal perception to a greater degree. But we’ve become so accustomed to this happening that we hardly notice it. Feldman’s music, especially that of his later years, more nearly approximates the quotidian time of which we’re only fleetingly aware. If his music seems strange, it’s not because it employs the temporal distortions to which we’ve become accustomed but, on the contrary, because it doesn’t.”

Scanner meets Alvin Lucier meets Iain Sinclair. I can only approve.

Andrew Clements’ review in the GuardianA whole weekend of music, films and other baubels celebrating Ligeti’s 80th birthday (which was way back in May, but you know how it is with booking places for yr birthday bash). I got to one of the films (the talk with Ligeti’s recent biographer, Richard Steinitz, and the composers Steve Martland and Robert Saxton was sold out, and the first film clashed with England-South Africa…), and the two centrepiece concerts: four concertos (although, disappointingly, not the Cello), and a staged version of his only opera Le Grand Macabre.

Clements says the four concertos ’span’ Ligeti’s career, but they also serve as bookends. Strangely, aside from the opera, none of Ligeti’s music completed between 1951 and 1988 was here. And - again the opera notwithstanding - this forms the bulk of the music upon which his career has been founded, and his reputation achieved. There was - I think - performance of Poème Symphonique (yeah, yeah), but I have a feeling this was more because of its interactive/didactic element (”Have you got a non-electric, mechanical, pyramid-shaped metronome? Bring it along…”) than anything else.

The three late works are very much the compositions of a man reaching the latter days - and greatest maturity - of his career. They lack none of the invention of his earlier music, but they have that assurance of technique that tends to come with age. I can’t imagine any composer younger than 50 scoring parts for ocarinas and swannee whistles (played here with plastic, toucan-shaped toys) in that most serious of genres, the piano concerto, and doing it with a (mostly) straight face. It’s the kind of gimmick you can only get away with if you have the confidence 80 years give you. The simple fact that many of Ligeti’s late works - the concertos and piano studies - draw on historical, Grand Master resonances (you can’t not think Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt) are an unmistakeable sign that this is a composer putting his house in order, assuring his legacy. Which is fine - but it is telling that it is with such works that the Barbican chose to mark this twilight anniversary.

At the start, though, we had the UK première of the Concert Romanesc, written in 1951 while Ligeti still lived in Soviet Hungary, two years before Stalin’s death, and five before the uprising and the moment Ligeti made his escape to the West. This piece has been available on CD for a while now (Teldec 8573 88261-2), but was clearly programmed as the best opportunity for its UK stage debut.

It’s a fine, curious piece - miles removed from Ligeti’s post-1956 work, but one of the better works to have been composed in Hungary at that time. It is the fourth movement that really grabs the attention. The piece is given the bombastic, pseudo-folky ending familiar from a lot of Soviet music (Shostakovich, later Prokofiev), but Ligeti tacks on an extraordinary coda - a stratospherically high violin hovers above some offstage horn-calls, suspending all expectations. It’s a frequent trick to a lot of later Central European music - you see it a lot in Górecki, for example - to subvert and upset a musical structure like this. The form suggests that the ending should be here, everything you’ve heard said it should be; but instead, it’s here, and nothing that went before meant quite what you thought it did.

And I’m tickled to see that CDDB categorises this month’s Wire giveaway CD as ‘Easy Listening’…

So, I’ve been thinking for a few days that having this blog is all very well and all, but what is it actually for? And it seems to me that although there is plenty of excellent blogging around yr popstars, and yr Wire-friendly music (and we all know who I mean - check right), I’ve yet to see anything consistently tackle that awkward stuff ‘modern composition’, ‘contemporary classical’, or whatever you want to call it. I’ve only seen a handful of ‘classical music’ blogs, and talkboards, and they’re pretty bad. (The one that used to sit on the Guardian’s site was like a horrible pastiche.) For some reason, concert music is really poorly served by popular writing; and contemporary concert music even worse.

I don’t know for sure why this should be, but I suspect it is to do with the way in which a musical style/genre reaches maturity in relation to its critical support. Jazz is a classic example. Journalistic writing/reviewing of jazz became very sophisticated relatively early on - the same is true for rock, pop, and so on. Perhaps because the two, mutually dependent streams developed at the same pace. However, the drier, strictly academic-analytical work lagged behind, only to be rectified a few decades down the line. So-called contemporary classical music, on the other hand, was conceived in the midst of an already established critical form, a form that had been comfortable dealing with the core 1650-1900 repertory for many years, but was ill-equipped to deal with rapid new developments. The academic work, on the other hand, in contrast to popular streams, was newly burgeoning, and thus capable of dealing with the new challenges.

This is a loosely conceived theory, but the upshot of it all is that while there is a vast array of excellent academic work on contemporary composition, the world seems almost incapable of talking about it on a popular, accessible, but meaningful level. Perhaps I’m being unfair, but aside from The Wire itself (which has some excellent coverage this month, including a primer on Spectral music. Do check out Grisey - the première of Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil just a few weeks after his death was a formative experience for me. The percussion section includes a giant ‘keyboard’ of about 20 gongs, which the percussionist has to hurl himself across the stage to play - all at an extremely quiet dynamic. Beautiful.), there is very little else, in print or in blog.*

And there is no reason why this should be. So, following in a grand tradition, expect to see more of me writing the kind of stuff I’d like to be reading.

*Please send any suggestions/oversights to the usual address!

Some good stuff on minimalism by Philip Sherburne in the current Urban Sounds.

Following on from the spam poetry mini-post below, the Rambler is amused to note that one Brad Sucks has actually produced a whole spam-inspired album. And listening to the MP3s does capture some of the feeling of swimming through Sobigs, porn and viagra adverts of a Monday morning…

[Spotted via The Register]

Well, frankly, this Google referral flatters me somewhat…

Spam poetry. Excellent stuff.

A quick glance at the Rambler’s Hotspam account reveals that Gollum, of all people, is trying to flog me some Viagra: “Ktn confidence staarts in youur panntss s,” he hisses.