Sophie Stone Amalgamations for New Sound.Pdf

Canterbury Christ Church University’s repository of research outputs http://create.canterbury.ac.uk Please cite this publication as follows: Stone, S. (2019) Pattern, form and silence in “Amalgamations”, an extended duration work. New Sound International Journal of Music, 53 (1). pp. 149-170. ISSN 0354-818X. Link to official URL (if available): This version is made available in accordance with publishers’ policies. All material made available by CReaTE is protected by intellectual property law, including copyright law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Contact: [email protected] Stone, S.: Pattern, form and silence in “Amalgamations”, an extended duration work VIEWS: The theory of the artist Article received on March 1st 2019 Article accepted on May 16th 2019 UDC: 786.61 Sophie Stone* Canterbury Christ Church University PATTERN, FORM AND SILENCE IN AMALGAMATIONS, AN EXTENDED DURATION WORK Abstract: The article examines Sophie Stone’s composition Amalgamations (2016), an extended duration work for solo organ. Pattern is explored in the form of both the notation and performance of the piece. The notation comprises verbal and graphic notation, with many possible combinations of instructions resulting in sustained sounds and silence. Amalgamations is non-linear and non-teleological. Tim Ingold’s notion of ‘wayfaring’ provides a way of understanding how a performer may negotiate the notation. Due to the improvisatory and aleatoric elements of the piece, each performance will be different. Numerous types of silences will result from performances of Amalgamations and the experience of these silences are different and are deter- mined by the sounds surrounding them. Key words: duration, silence, performance, form, pattern, Cage, Beuger, Feldman, Ingold. Th is article will discuss Amalgamations (2016), a work for solo organ, which is the fi rst composition resulting from my doctoral project entitled Exploring * Author contact information: [email protected] 149 New Sound 53, I/2019 Extended Duration Music: Compositional Strategies, Performance Situations and Silence. Th is project aims to gain new perspectives on composing exper- imental extended duration music and comprises an investigation of notation, possible performance situations – including installations and performance spaces – and the diff erent uses and types of silence. In line with this research, Amalgamations has an open duration and can therefore be performed over an extended period of time. Despite this open duration, I suggest a minimum length of twenty minutes in the performance instructions; this achieves my desired aesthetic, which requires a type of listening diff erent to that for music of a shorter duration. To help contextualize my research, a discussion of Morton Feldman’s (1926–1987) late works and, in particular, his String Quartet II (1983) is nec- essary. Th e minimum length of Amalgamations is partly intuitive, but the duration of music over twenty minutes is a topic that has been discussed by Feldman. Feldman’s works from the late 1970s pushed music beyond this duration, which was characteristic of the majority of new music written for the concert hall at the time. His work explored much longer time spans, for example For Samuel Beckett (1987) has a duration of fi ft y-fi ve minutes, For Philip Guston (1984) approximately four hours, and String Quartet II up to six hours. Musicologist Bob Gilmore wrote that in this type of music, “form became essentially irrelevant”.1 Feldman himself stated: My whole generation was hung up on the 20 to 25 minute piece. It was our clock. We all got to know it, and how to handle it. As soon as you leave the 20–25 minute piece behind, in a one-movement work, different problems arise. Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half it’s scale. Form is easy – just the division of things into parts. But scale is another matter. You have to have control of the piece – it requires a heightened kind of concentration. Before, my pieces were like objects; now, they’re like evolving things.2 Feldman acknowledged that longer works require a diff erent method of composition with a focus on scale. He noted that rather than the music being considered an “object” it was now “evolving”, and it is the evolving nature of the music that makes listening to extended duration works so diff erent. In a 1981 article, on the subject of scale in his works, Feldman wrote: 1 Bob Gilmore, “Wild Air: Th e Music of Kevin Volans”, Journal of Music, 2006. http:// journalofmusic.com/focus/wild-air-music-kevin-volans – accessed 18 February 2018. 2 Morton Feldman, A short biographical statement taken from Universal Edition’s cata- logue of Feldman score, Wien, Universal Edition, 1998. 150 Stone, S.: Pattern, form and silence in “Amalgamations”, an extended duration work It seems that scale (this subliminal mathematics) is not given to us in Western culture, but must be arrived at individually in our own work in our own way. Like that small Turkish ‘tile’ rug, it is Rothko’s scale that removes any argument over the proportions of one area to another, or over its degree of symmetry or asym- metry. The sum of the parts does not equal the whole; rather, scale is discovered and contained as an image. It is not form that floats the painting, but Rothko’s finding that particular scale which suspends all proportions in equilibrium.3 Feldman’s later works had to be long as if he were to form shorter compositions by having fewer repeats, editing out sections, or scaling down the ideas, the music could seem “simplistic or uninteresting”.4 Th e ideas of his longer works evolve through time and this is why they do not work for shorter durations. For Feldman, as in my own work, it is the auditory experience of a performance that makes “ultimate sense of the music”, not the notation.5 In an interview with Michael Whiticker, Feldman discussed his String Quartet II and the reasons behind its extended duration. Feldman explained that the piece was so long because the human attention span is so short and this was “a serious problem”; in music, he was interested in what he could remember and his length of concentration.6 He wanted to “alienate memory” by creating diff erences in repetitions so that they would only be vaguely fa- miliar to the listener.7 On composing the string quartet, Feldman explained, “I’m not doing very much – that’s why it’s so long. In fact, what I’m doing in the string quartet is essentially using three notes […] Everything else is a repetition”.8 He used combinatory techniques to develop the three notes and it is this technique that he said diff erentiates composing extended duration music from shorter compositions. Feldman stated that compositionally String Quartet II involves “the only two elements known to us in music”, which are “change” and “reiteration”.9 3 Morton Feldman, “Crippled Symmetry”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2, Autumn 1981, 103. 4 John Rockwell, “Morton Feldman (and Crippled Symmetry)”, Morton Feldman Page, http://www.cnvill.net/mfrockwl.htm, accessed 18 February 2018. 5 Ibid. 6 Michael Whiticker, “Morton Feldman: Conversation without Cage, Michael Whiticker, 25 July 1984”, in: Chris Villars (Ed.), Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lec- tures 1964–1987, London, Hyphen Press, 2006, 185–186. 7 Ibid.,186. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 151 New Sound 53, I/2019 Gilmore coined the term “overcoming form” to describe extended duration music from which “questions of form became essentially irrelevant”.10 Th is apt term is part of the title of Richard Glover and Bryn Harrison’s book overcoming form: refl ections on immersive listening (2013) which discusses this specifi c type of music and what Harrison describes as music “viewed as one immersive experience”.11 Th is is a type of music where the listener is of- fered “a much closer (one might say magnifi ed) perspective of the materials through which we are invited to focus on the subtlest aspects of change”.12 Th e listener is also challenged by not knowing where they are within the work or where the work is heading, which “adds to the abstractness or intangibili- ty of experience”.13 Although these quotes describe Feldman’s String Quartet II, they can easily translate to other works which comprise repetition and/ or subtle changes of ideas over an extended duration. Music theorist, Dora Hanninen explains that in this type of music it is diffi cult to apply tradition- al analysis due to the notion of emergence; it is the accumulation of events which gives meaning and makes the work experiential.14 Building from these initial observations, this article will focus on both the notation and performance of Amalgamations as it is the experiential and indeterminate nature of this extended duration work which provides an in- teresting theoretical discussion. I will examine the diff erences and similari- ties in pattern and form in both movements, considering the experience of potential repetitions over extended durations, and will employ Tim Ingold’s notion of ‘wayfaring’ as an example of how a performer’s negotiation with the notation can be understood.15 I will also discuss the possible types of silence experienced in Amalgamations, drawing on Edward Pearsall’s defi nition of “performative silence” and examples of works by Antoine Beuger.16 10 Bob Gilmore, “Wild Air…”, op. cit. 11 Bryn Harrison, “Repetitions in extended time: recursive structures and musical tem- porality”, in: Richard Glover and Bryn Harrison (Eds.), Overcoming form: refl ections on immersive listening, Huddersfi eld, University of Huddersfi eld Press, 2013, 49.

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