MSM CPP Survey EC 2. Exploring structure

“We are all more or less treading on ice, and as long as this is the case, the organizational systems being put forward represent guidelines to prevent the composer from faltering. And one has to face the fact that there are as many systems as there are grains of sand, systems that can be dreamed up and set in motion as easily as clockwork. Their number is probably infinite, but certainly only a very few of them are acceptable systems, compatible with their means of expression, and applicable without self-contradiction to all the dimensions of music. Of these, still fewer are so perfectly prefigured that they yield beautiful and interesting music.” Stockhausen, Texte, i, 47.

The Gardener: Structure from Within

Stockhausen

Kontra- (1952-53) for ten instruments: ausmultiplikation

Gruppen (1955-57) for 3 orchestras: rhythm-harmony

in ... whole envelopes of rhythmic blocks are exact lines of mountains that I saw in Paspels in Switzerland right in front of my little window. Many of the time spectra, which are represented by superimpositions of different rhythmic layers—of different speeds in each layer—their envelope which describes the increase and decrease of the number of layers, their shape, so to speak, the shape of the time field, are the curves of the mountain's contour which I saw when I looked out the window. (Cott 1973, 141)

Klavierstück X (1961): extreme parametricization

Mantra for two ring-modulated pianos, crotales, woodblock, radio (1970): formula technique

Boulez

Le Marteau sans maître (1955): structure from poetry, and the irrational turn

By applying himself thoroughly to the text, the composer would uncover “a whole web of relationships… including, among others, the affective relationships, but also the entire mechanism of the poem, from its pure sound to its intelligible organization.” Boulez, quoted in Griffiths, Modern Music and After. MSM CPP Survey EC

“one soon realizes that composition and organization cannot be confused without falling into a maniacal inanity.” ibid.

“One used to find, especially in country towns, cafés where two walls with mirrors ran parallel. And when you entered these cafés you saw yourself to infinity; but if you took one mirror away, you saw only one reflection. I think the imagination is situated between irrational and rational invention just as between two mirrors: if it deprives itself either of the irrational or the rational, then it can see itself only once.” ibid.

Text by René Char (in translation)

The furious craftsmanship The red caravan on the edge of the nail And corpse in the basket And plowhorses in the horseshoe I dream the head on the point of my knife Peru.

Hangmen of solitude The step has gone away, the walker has fallen silent On the dial of Imitation The Pendulum throws its instinctive load of granite.

Stately building and presentiments I hear marching in my legs The dead sea waves overhead Child the wild seaside pier Man the imitated illusion Pure eyes in the woods Are searching in tears for a habitable head.

Berio

Nones (1954) for orchestra

“[] never gave relevant results…. What I’m against is the use of serialism in the abstract sense without taking into consideration the sound process…. It becomes a sort of immobile, static world revolving around itself.” “ on New Music: An Interview with David Roth,” Musical Opinion 99 (September 1976): 548. MSM CPP Survey EC

The Sculptor: Structure from Without

Physical Metaphors

“When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived in my works, taking the place of linear counterpoint. When these sound-masses collide, the phenomena of penetration or repulsion will seem to occur… In the moving masses you would be conscious of their transmutations when they pass over different layers, when they penetrate certain opacities, or are dilated in certain rarefactions.” Varèse 1967 p197.

“First I chose types with various group-characteristics and various types of internal organization, as: grainy, friable, fibrous, slimy, sticky and compact materials. An investigation of the relative permeability of these characters indicated which could be mixed and which resisted mixture.” Ligeti about his Artikulations. Ligeti, The Metamorphosis of , Die Riehe.

Iannis Xenakis

Metasteseis (1953-54): hyperbolic paraboloids MSM CPP Survey EC

Pithoprakta (1955-56): Brownian motion

“Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamour fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail. Imagine, in addition the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context... are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner. They are stochastic laws.” MSM CPP Survey EC

Evryali (1973) for piano: arborescences

Pléïades (1979) for percussion

Ligeti Atmosphères for orchestra (1961) Volumina (1961-62) Lux Aeterna (1966) Lontano (1967)

“Technically speaking I have always approached musical texture through part-writing. Both Atmosphères and Lontano have a dense canonic structure. But you cannot actually hear the polyphony, the canon. You hear a kind of impenetrable texture, something like a very densely woven cobweb. I have retained melodic lines in the process of composition, they are governed by rules as strict as Palestrina's or those of the Flemish school, but the rules of this polyphony are worked out by me. The polyphonic structure does not come through, you cannot hear it; it remains hidden in a microscopic, underwater world, to us inaudible.” Ligeti, quoted in Bernard, Jonathan. “Voice Leading as a Spatial Function in the Music of Ligeti”. Music Analysis 13, nos. 2/3 (July–October): 227.53. MSM CPP Survey EC

Penderecki String Quartet no. 2 (1968) Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960)

Xenakis Kagel MSM CPP Survey EC

Open Structures

Raymond Queneau Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961)

Stockhausen Klavierstück XI (1956) MSM CPP Survey EC

Momente for 13 instruments, 4 mixed choirs, soprano (1962-69): momentform

A moment is any “formal unit in a particular composition that is recognizable by a personal and unmistakable character.”

Moment form musics “neither aim at the climax, nor at prepared (and consequently expected) multiple climaxes, and the usual introductory, rising, transitional and fading- away stages are not delineated in a development curve encompassing the entire duration of the work. On the contrary, these forms are immediately intense and seek to maintain the level of continued "main points", which are constantly equally present, right up until they . In these forms a minimum or a maximum may be expected in every moment, and no developmental direction can be predicted with certainty from the present one; they have always already commenced, and could continue forever; in them either everything present counts, or nothing at all; and each and every Now is not unremittingly regarded as the mere consequence of the one which preceded it and as the upbeat to the coming one—in which one puts one's hope—but rather as something personal, independent and centred, capable of existing on its own. They are forms in which an instant does not have to be just a bit of a temporal line, nor a moment just a particle of a measured duration, but rather in which concentration on the Now—on every Now—makes vertical slices, as it were, that cut through a horizontal temporal conception to a timelessness I call eternity: an eternity that does not begin at the end of time but is attainable in every moment. I am speaking of musical forms in which apparently nothing less is being attempted than to explode (even to overthrow) the temporal concept—or, put more accurately: the concept of duration. . . .” (Stockhausen, Texte, i, 189-210.)

Boulez Third Piano Sonata (1955-57) Pli selon pli (first version, 1957-1962)

Lutoslawski Jeux vénitiens (1960-61)

“While listening to [Cage’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra], I suddenly realized that… I could progress toward the whole not from the little detail but the other way around – I should start out from the chaos and create order in it, gradually. That is when I started to compose Jeux vénitiens” Lutoslawski, 1976, 12.

Kagel Transición II (1958-59) for piano, percussion, and two tapes MSM CPP Survey EC

Prima Vista (1962-63)

Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (1919-1994) Mobile for Shakespeare (1960) Streichquartett (1977) MSM CPP Survey EC

Game Music

Xenakis: Strategie (1962) Xenakis: Duel (1959) Christian Wolff: For 1, 2 or 3 people John Zorn: Cobra, Hockey, Lacrosse, Xu Feng