Chapter 11 - Musical Form, Expectation, Attention, and Quality

Summary

Someone asked, “When one is confronted with disaster, how can one avoid it?”

Joshu said, “That’s it!”

—Yoel Hoffman, Japanese Death Poems

This essay presents a poetics of music that brings much of my thinking about music into one field of inquiry, attention. As a result, it overlaps with many passages in the other texts in the book. For instance, it literally returns to Cage’s idea about deceptive cadences and the emptiness of cognition in music, amplifies my take on Wolpe’s music, and connects into my talk on nature and music via the Wordsworth quotation at the end of the essay. The term “suchness” is of Buddhist extraction; the term gestures at the experience of perceiving things as they are, without mental intervention or interpretation.

The reader may wonder at my statement, “It occurred to me then that musical form is just and completely a matter of change—not invariance,” since I often stress invariance as a prime compositional orientation in my talks. But I define invariance under the rubric of transformation; it is special case. Moreover, invariance has to do with the material of music embedded, to be sure, in music’s flowing nature. Invariance invites a flowing (in one’s memory) from past to present as we attend to the music; this attention to what we recall is a part of experience, but it is not sheer experience itself. It thickens the plot, but it is not necessary. Nevertheless, invariance that promotes reference is an important aspect of how my music goes.

For many years, I have been creating unique forms for my music. Many of them are based on the idea of traversing a musical space in the most efficient and combinatorial way: all the ways to do X or be in Y or be Z. Others play with the idea of recontextualizing musical materials and passages by juxtaposition and overlap. What these forms have in common is a concern with a process of transformation that places things in new contexts, and new things in existing contexts. But what are these “things?” Certainly not themes or motives, but various states of mobility and gesture, which are identified not so much by their content as by an emergent effect that arises from the features of the materials and their combinations.