Quotes on Music & Composition

[ht73]

I gave up my music because I had received from it all that I had to receive. To serve God one must sacrifice what is dearest to one; and so I sacrificed my music. I had composed songs; I sang and played the vina; and practicing this music I arrived at a stage where I touched the Music of the Spheres. Then every soul became for me a musical note, and all life became music. Inspired by it I spoke to the people, and those who were attracted by my words listened to them, instead of listening to my songs. Now, if I do anything, it is to tune souls instead of instruments; to harmonize people instead of notes. If there is anything in my philosophy, it is the law of harmony: that one must put oneself in harmony with oneself and with others. I have found in every word a certain musical value, a melody in every thought, harmony in every feeling; and I have tried to interpret the same thing, with clear and simple words, to those who used to listen to my music. I played the vina until my heart turned into this very instrument; then I offered this instrument to the divine Musician, the only musician existing. Since then I have become His flute; and when He chooses, He plays His music. The people give me credit for this music, which in reality is not due to me but to the Musician who plays on His own instrument.

Hazrat Inayat Khan (prologue to the Mysticism of Music, Sound, and Word)

[Starthief]

Not quite a quote on music, but I just ran across this on my feed:

[Jet]

I saw this topic and immediately thought of this quote, then remembered I’d already posted it somewhere on here. I love these thoughts on “structure”.

Time Signatures in Electronic music

I really like this from James Tenney back in the early 70s, which is making a slightly different point, but still worth a read:

I think of form as the same thing, on a larger temporal scale, as what’s called content on a smaller scale. That old form/content dichotomy is, to me, a spurious one, because they involve the same thing at different hierarchical levels of perception. What we take to be the substance or content of some sound — say, a string quartet — is really the result of forms — formal shapes and structures at a microscopic, or “microphonic” level: particular envelopes, wave-forms, and sequences of these — details in the signal. All form is just the same thing at a larger level, involving spans of time over, say, five or ten or twenty minutes or more. It’s precisely the same thing physically. When you begin to see it that way, you can begin to feel it musically. So my interest in form is identical to my interest in sound ( laughs ).

In the same interview on Ubu that’s from, he talks about getting away from drama in music, which I relate to as well - and could’ve snuck into that topic on theory of ambient music, almost…

JT: Those pieces have a lot to do with this attitude toward sound, but also with something else, which is the notion of the avoidance of drama. They involve a very high degree of predictability. If the audience can just believe it, after they’ve heard the first twenty seconds of the piece, they can almost determine what’s going to happen the whole rest of the time. When they know that’s the case, they don’t have to worry about it anymore—they don’t have to sit on the edge of their seats. . . .

GY: Waiting for the big bang.

JT: What they can do is begin to really listen to the sounds, get inside them, notice the details, and consider or meditate on the overall shape of the piece, simple as it may be. It’s often interesting how within a simple shape there can be relationships that are surprising. It’s curious—in a way, the result in this highly determinate situation is the same as in an indeterminate one, where things are changing so rapidly and unpredictably that you lose any sense of drama there, too. Now people react to that in two different ways: some are angry about it, because they expect, and demand, meaningful drama. But if you can relax that demand and say “no, this is not drama, this is just ‘change’” (laughs)—then you can listen to the sounds for themselves rather than in relation to what preceded or what will follow.

[Jet]

Karl Popper speaking in 1979:

By far the most influential, and the most widely accepted theory of art, of music, and of poetry is the theory that all art is, essentially, self-expression : the expression or the revelation of the artist, and especially the expression of his emotions. I regard this theory as completely mistaken. It is trivially true that we express our inner state in everything we do, including of course in art. But we express our inner state also in the way we walk, cough, or blow our nose. Self-expression cannot, therefore, be used to characterize art.
But I do not merely regard the expressionist theory of art as mistaken. I regard it as having a pernicious and a destructive influence upon art. In great art, the artist considers his work as important, rather than himself. This healthy attitude is undermined by the theory that art is self-expression.

It’s not just about music, and I’m not even sure how much of it I agree with just yet, but I like it.

[jonsimon]

1: one time in a video of some sort, I heard victor wooten say something to the effect of “if you make a mistake in a performance, just repeat it one more time. then it’s on purpose” i really liked that.

2: one time, before a show, I was nervous and telling this older gentleman that I always got anxiety before shows. He said to me “if you don’t get the jits, you ain’t shit!” That changed my life.

[misc_frank]

I like that. It reminded me of John Cage, and some of his anti-expression (I believe it’s Cage, but I’m not certain) sentiments / practices. It reminded me of this quote (by Morton Feldman):

“patterns are ‘complete’ in themselves and in no need of development – only of extension. My concern is: what is its scale when prolonged, and what is the best method to arrive at it? My past experience was not to ‘meddle’ with the material, but use my concentration as a guide to what might transpire. I mentioned this to Stockhausen once when he had asked me what my secret was. ‘I don’t push the sounds around.’ Stockhausen mulled this over and asked: ‘Not even a little bit?’”

for some reason I thought this was from a conversation between Feldman and Cage, but I was mistaken.

[ntrier]

2: one time, before a show, I was nervous and telling this older gentleman that I always got anxiety before shows. He said to me “if you don’t get the jits, you ain’t shit!” That changed my life.

Somewhere I overheard a student tell a teacher they were nervous, and the teacher said “If you’re nervous that’s because you care.”

I use that with all my students now, it seems to help a lot. I guess we’re moving the jumble of thoughts from “what if I mess up” to “I am prepared to do well”…

[vals]

Experimental music notation resources

There is a common misconception – almost omnipresent in the domain of contemporary academic music - that there is a complete and reciprocal match between a written score and its sounding equivalent. This goes to show how far today’s culture is alienated from the living phenomenon of music and its practice! What you discover, when you actually make music, is that you can find everything in the score except the music itself. Mahler, of course, had already said this. The ubiquitously accepted id…

from Ana-Maria Avram, The Metamorphosis of the Musical Score

[ht73]

Great quote! I’ve been thinking of this in relation to the “Words in music” thread and some other things.

Fundamentally, I think Avram is pointing out a more general problem with the signifier/signified relation. Seeing everything through this relation tends to suppress the performative function of language which is always more primordial. The insight is to see that what she’s saying about music notation holds for all forms of language or exteriorization in general (writing, technology, etc.).

Avram’s key insight is that notes don’t “stand for” music, they “stand in for” it. Notes don’t re-present; they complement. The music (what presences) is the tip of the iceberg; the notes; the countless hours of practice; the musicians’ bodily skills; their dreams and aspirations are the unseen foundation. Each moment thus “contains”, or is founded upon, an entire past, and an entire future.

Skills (and the support given them by notation) are what removes the need for the musician to focus on these things (and hence themselves) in performance so they can fully open themselves to the moment (i.e. the music; what is not themselves). These elements are no less “real” than the music. But they are virtual, not actual. The act of opening oneself comes forth in the dramatic pause before the first gesture – a pause which includes the audience, which invites the audience also to open themselves. This pause manifests the buildup or intensification of a potential field across which the music flows, appropriating performers and audience alike to make itself present.

But Avram’s comments hold for language as well. If language simply duplicates what is already present, there would be no need for language. There is a presentation in language but it is in no sense a “re”-presentation. What language presents is precisely what did not presence. The speaker points out what is not there, and makes something yet different come forth. The writer writes because she is absent, she writes for posterity so she can continue to affect things after she is gone. The meaning of language is already the other meaning: the meaning brought forth in the response to language, and in what this response retrospectively projects back upon language in terms of how we make sense of it.

[vals]

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

Claude Debussy

When I used programs to produce music like ST/4, ST/10, or ST/48, the output sometimes lacked interest. So I had to change [it]. I reserved that freedom for myself. Other composers, like Barbaud, have acted differently. He did some programs using serial principles and declared: “The machine gave me that soI have to respect it.” This is totally wrong, because it was he who gave the machine the rule!

Iannis Xenakis in Varga, B (1996) Conversations with Xenakis

“Formalized music” does not sound free, but it is. I wanted to achieve a general musical landscape with many elements, not all of which were formally derived from one another.

Iannis Xenakis (1996) Eshate Ereuna

[vals]

Peyet: But then, how do you compose?
Dumitrescu: I try to surround myself with a new reality. I see the things in their primordial nature, I continue… what precedes the formed. The uncertain preoccupies me. Therefore impulses… beginnings. These things have, in them, something paradisic, a purity, an initial halo. The world needs more and more the ingenuity of expression, searching for it, without knowing where to find it.
I had the chance to return to the sources. I returned to Orphic mythology. We have the sound and the cultural thought, symphonic, and another thing: the natural sound. Between the natural and the cultural there are significant differences. The natural sound is a complex of pure and impure things: noise, inconstant doublings, adjacent effects, beats, spectral rubbings. The natural can enrich the cultural. It is what I do.
All that re-enters in the idea of a pre-language. Is one allowed to say that? An “Ursprach” without connotation, denotation. If something could characterize my work in entirety, it would be a “miraculous” state, of the beginning of the world.
The sound appears like something not generated, not created. What follows, it is a sort of fascination with ontology. An ontology truly lived.
Almost always, my music liberates latent forces, allows them to develop in themselves. Only after I start to organize a conflict, I produce a more or less spectacular jump towards other materials and, towards the end, the arc collapses. Energies gradually die out. At the interior, is I have an insane distilling of timbres, situations… is it a good resume?

Peyet: The music is a dialogue with nothingness…
Dumitrescu: Yes, an ontological adventure counters nothingness…

Iancu Dumitrescu (1995) Acousmatic Provoker, interview with G.Peyret and S.Leroy

[vals]

music is an ordered arrangement of sounds and silences whose meaning is presentative rather than denotative

music is the actualization of the possibility of any sound whatever to present to some human being a meaning which he experiences with his body—that is to say, with his mind, his feelings, his senses, his will, and his metabolism

Music is not a fact or a thing in the world, but a meaning constituted by human beings… To talk about such experience in a meaningful way demands several things. First, we have to be willing to let the composition speak to us, to let it reveal its own order and significance… Second, we have to be willing to question our assumptions about the nature and role of musical materials… Last, and perhaps most important, we have to be ready to admit that describing a meaningful experience is itself meaningful

Thomas Clifton (1983) Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology

[vals]

Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music

Luciano Berio (1985) in Varga, Two Interviews

[Starthief]

I think it’s important if you’re a creative person, or aspire to be, that you don’t spend too much time aspiring or asking advice. Just get going and address what’s roaring inside you.

You just make up your mind, like, “I’m gonna write this book.” How many people are gonna read it? I don’t care. How can I control that? I just want to do the damn thing. That allows me to go unrestrained.

Henry Rollins

[lijnenspel]

“Although existing in all music, the noise-element has been to music as sex to humanity, essential to its existence, but impolite to mention, something to be cloaked by ignorance and silence.”

Henry Cowell “The Joys of Noise” (1929)

[ht73]

So, in short, the male mosquito is actually hearing a third, distorted ghost tone between its own flight tone and the female flight tone, and it is this he tunes into.

It’s only natural: we pick out tonal signals and discard the noise. The mosquito tunes into the noise and discards the signal. If we try to further analyse this way of hearing, several important aspects stand out. It is a listening that operates via tuning and making sound oneself simultaneously. And it is a listening-performing in a duet with another being, there is no solitary listening activity of a neutral receptacle.

How can the composer become a mosquito, participating in this dual mode of listening-performing? By imitation, or some animistic ritual? The challenge is that a mimesis in many ways replicates all of the problems of translation. It immediately becomes a question of the quality of the reproduction and appropriation to our mode of sensing, and the otherness of the animal sensorial system and its life-world is lost in the process.

This is not to say that there are no interesting strategies to be learnt from older traditions. In his studies of hunters in Siberia, anthropologist Rane Willerslev has described their special form of animism. The hunters dress up and disguise themselves as the animal they are hunting for. But it is important that the disguise is not too perfect. Then they would lose themselves and become the animal completely. So they enter an in-between state, between the animal and the human. As Willerslev points out, “Yukhagirs attempt to assume an animal’s point of view by intentionally acting as an imperfect copy.”

I imagine an instrument being built according to this Yukhagir animism. Such an instrument should ideally not translate or transduce between worlds, but rather transform them topologically, working as part of the system itself, modulating its speed, the movement, the folding, the reversing, the constant change. It needs to be an open-ended instrument, an imperfect mutant, a hybrid between the scientific and the musical. Part animal, part digital. Flawed and badly patched together out of scrap collected on my travels, people would point at it and laugh when it is brought out of its case. When sounded, it should produce a chord that poses a question to a place — simultaneously about its physical, biological, and historical character. And after resonating and reverberating through the material, it should return to us.

Espen Sommer Eide, “Exercises in Non-Human Listening” (2019)

[Wurrm]

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

[Nadia Boulanger]

[vals]

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

John Coltrane

[vals]

The soundscape composition, with the interdisciplinary conceptual background of soundscape studies and acoustic communication, and the technical means of granular time-stretching and multi-channel diffusion provides a well-developed model for the musical use of environmental sound. The characteristic principles of the soundscape composition as derived from its evolved practice are:
(a) listener recognisability of the source material is maintained, even if it subsequently undergoes transformation;
(b) the listener’s knowledge of the environmental and psychological context of the soundscape material is invoked and encouraged to complete the network of meanings ascribed to the music;
© the composer’s knowledge of the environmental and psychological context of the soundscape material is allowed to influence the shape of the composition at every level, and ultimately the composition is inseparable from some or all of those aspects of reality; and ideally,
(d) the work enhances our under- standing of the world, and its influence carries over into everyday perceptual habits.
Elsewhere I have described the ideal balance that should be achieved in such work as matching the inner complexity of the sonic organisation to the outer complexity of relationships in the real world, without one being subordinate to the other. Thus, the real goal of the soundscape composition is the reintegration of the listener with the environment in a balanced ecological relationship.

What acousmatic music and soundscape composition share is the primacy of listening, the ability to extract information at different simultaneous levels, and a recognition of the ability of sound to shape space and time, including the creation of sound spaces through diffusion practices.
Where they diverge is more of a matter of emphasis regarding the role of context.
Electroacoustic music recognises the abstracted aspects of its language while acknowledging its movement towards some point of absolute abstractness, whereas soundscape composition begins in complete contextual immersion and moves towards the abstracted middle ground.
In terms of the balance between inner and outer complexity, phonography resides largely in outer complexity, abstract composition in inner complexity, with soundscape composition and some of the more abstracted forms of acousmatic music based on the interplay between the two.

Barry Truax (2008) Soundscape Composition as Global Music

[jnoble]

This is all too complex for me.

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“If it sounds good, it IS good.”

― Duke Ellington