Indeterminacy and The ‘Open Work’ Defining ‘classical’ music
Composer
Text (Musical Notation)
(Reading) Performer
(Passive) Audience
Philip Guston, Painting (1954)
Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow (1956)
Morton Feldman (1926-1987) Intersection #1 (1951)
“My desire here was not to “compose,” but to project sounds into time, free from a compositional rhetoric that had no place here. In order not to involve the performer (i.e. myself) in memory… and because sounds no longer had an inherent symbolic shape, I allowed for indeterminacies in regard to pitch.” Indeterminacy:
Deliberately leaving one or more elements of the composition to the discretion of the performer. Indeterminacy of pitch: “high, middle, and low” chosen by each instrumentalist in performance. Alexander Calder, Untitled (1976)
Alexander Calder, Untitled (1976)
Alexander Calder, Untitled (1976)
Earle Brown (1926-2002) Four Systems (1952)
“a conceptually ‘mobile’ approach to basically fixed graphic elements, subject to an infinite number of performance realizations through the involvement of the performer’s . . . response to the intentionally ambiguous graphic stimuli . . .”
• No indication for length, form, instrumentation, pitch content, dynamics, etc. • Graphics only: consists of patterns of lines of various thicknesses.
John Cage Variations II (1961)
• “for any number of players and any sound producing means.” • No fixed document; only moveable transparent sheets. • A means of generating a score, considered infinitely variable • Pianist David Tudor
Early Electronic Music Early Sound Technology c. 1880: Wax Cylinder
Early Sound Technology c. 1890 Gramophone
Early Sound Technology
1935, Germany: Magnetic Tape
1951: Portable Field Recorder Musique Concrète
Pierre Schaffer (1910-1995) Études aux chemins de fer (1948)
• Composed entirely of recorded sound Elektronische Musik
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) Studie II (1954)
• Composed entirely of sound produced by electronic devices.
• Sine Tones (“Pure Tones”) Music…
Without performers.
Infinitely repeatable.
Karlheinz Stockhausen Gesang der Jünglinge (1956)
• Blends recorded and synthetic sound
• Text from book of Daniel; “the Fiery Furnace”
Karlheinz Stockhausen Mikrophonie (1961)
• Filters / Filtering