JeremyCumbo

When I was in music school I was taught two different ideas about what the ‘intentions’ of the composer ought to be (there are many different variations on these ideas and some ideas that are entirely different - but these two were common in my school).

1. The “Every Detail” method. Wherein every single detail of the music is completely and totally decided by the composer. Every subtle nuance, every slight shading of how the music is to be played. This seems to be the norm in ‘classical music’. The score, when presented to the musician, is to describe with as much precision as can be mustered about how the music is to be played; and the musician is to do their best to bring about the composer’s intentions as exactly as possible. I have even been told by various teachers that if a musician asks about some detail of my music and I haven’t happened to consider that detail before I should make up something on the spot. The composer is to never allow even the slightest doubt that the music as conceived within my head is not fully formed - is not absolutely complete as written on the score. This fits in very well with the notion of “Composer as God” - omniscient and all-powerful.

2. “Aleatoric” methods. Some or all of the music is left to chance. Through some mechanism - often involving computerization - some facet of the music is ‘randomized’. It could be that the musicians are instructed to play random notes for a portion of the piece. It could be that dice were rolled by the composer in order to select which notes to put into the piece. Often the randomness is constrained so that it falls within some set limits - to restrain the literal chaos such methods bring about.

Of course in truth all composition involves a bit of both. No composer has predetermined every subtle nuance of every piece (argue if you will - I don’t believe even those old dead Germans were capable of such). And even the most radical of composers can’t escape the fact that you have to have some influence on those things you create.

In popular music and in Jazz there seems to have been an acceptance of the inevitable role that chance plays in creating music. It’s expected that recording artists will perform different ‘takes’ differently - that’s part of the reason they do so many. And Jazz, of course, is built on the idea of “composing” the music as it’s played - which in a way is about as aleatoric as you can get and still control what you create.

Well I’ve had the idea for a while now to create a piece in a slightly different way. In a way that allows a lot of control but also makes use of the benefits of chance - namely an evolutionary process. The plan is this:

• write a series of simple motifs which could be placed in just about any order without the transitions seeming disjunct. all of the motives will be in the same style, which was chosen during the early stages of composing the piece.
• write some computer code to generate semi-random orderings of these motifs. generate and record one random ordering per day for some set number of days until a large collection has been generated.
• after many listenings reduce the number of orderings to the ones that are most desirable according to my preference. build the piece from these few.

My hope is that this will give me both the control that I desire and also allow me to benefit from chance, hopefully coming up with variations on my own musical ideas which I never would have imagined. More soon…