Research
Point: Electronic Music
Given recent developments in technology
post WWII, there were a number of instrumental inventions that enabled
composers to experiment with different sounds.
Beginning with Cahill’s Telharmonium in 1897 and later developments such
as the Theremin and even tape recorder, technology had ushered in a whole new
way of viewing, composing, listening and recording music.
This must have been quite an exciting time
for modernist composers and it was an opportunity to experiment with completely
new pitches and techniques. Also this
new technology provided an opportunity for music to be heard by larger
audiences, given the relative ease of recording and distributing.
Interestingly, it seems that at this time,
composers were still reluctant to fully ‘break away’ from traditional
techniques and therefore incorporated the sounds of both acoustic and
electronic instruments.
Research
Point: Indeterminacy & John Cage
Indeterminacy can best be described as
‘music with consideration for chance’.
With three distinct styles of composition being chance, aleatory and
stochastic. Chance refers to the
application of ‘chance’ the composition stage, whilst aleatory and stochastic
refer to ‘chance’ being made into a feature during the performance level or
incorporating random ‘mathematically-chosen’ structure, respectively. However, composers such as Cage have been
known to incorporate more than one of these methods simultaneously.
Another form of indeterminacy involves the
use of visual or verbal signs or symbols to loosely notate the player's
parameters. My later studies of Graphic
Scores help to further explain this method.
A good example of Indeterminacy used with
the ‘chance method’ (i.e. whilst at the writing stage) is John Cage’s Music of Changes (1951) in which it is
believed that Cage adopted an ancient Oriental method to define all elements of
his composition. Pierre
Schaeffer was a French composer famous for aleatoric composition, which includes
external sounds (i.e. of the audience) as a distinct feature of his work. Gendy3
(1991) by Iannis Xenakis was written entirely using a stochastic style with a
special devised computer program.
Possibly one of the most famous examples of both
aleatoric music and John Cage’s creativity was his composition 4’33”” which relies entirely on the
sound of the audience to create the music.
Whilst I appreciate any potential
development within musical style, I am struggling to find the artistic value in
indeterminacy. Although I can understand
Cage’s ambitions to move away from the complexities of musical systems such as
‘serial music’, I believe that, particularly Cage’s 4’33””, makes a mockery of musical heritage and tradition and I would
question whether Cage’s imagination may be somewhat limited in his compositional
abilities.
Exercise:
Consider chance and serial music
Given my opinions of Cage’s composition in
the previous section of this course, I am keen to discover more on his work in
this exercise, and hopefully change my opinions of his musical and compositional
style. I have therefore chosen to
listen to some of Cage’s most famous pieces whilst also listening to number of
pieces composition using a ‘serial’ technique, so that I can contrast and
compare the two vastly different styles.
This research can found in my listening log.
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