September’s Pendulum concert was a spectacular introduction to new music here at CU Boulder. The program was short and sweet, and included about half acoustic music, and half pieces of live solo performances with electronic music. While the Schwantner was beautifully orchestrated and gave me much to think about, and Dan Brandt’s short piece ‘Sleep’ for solo piano had beautiful and narrative moments worth remembering, it was actually the three electronic pieces that got me thinking the most. In particular, it got me thinking, how do I talk about forms in electronic music, how it evolves over time, if there is no ‘traditional’ form in place?
Jess Garrett, Hunter Ewen, and Cole Ingraham all had works on the concert that combined a live, solo performer with electronics. Each composer approached this instrumentation differently. Jess’s sound world was awash in electronic tones, like a sonic landscape of contours on top of which a slow melody flowed. Hunter Ewen's piece was like a Zen koan: short text, minimally executed, but with maximum potential. The violist spoke the text while simultaneously playing, and a delay in the microphone attached to the viola created a distant echo effect. The final score to the piece looked like waves in a pond, with beautiful circular notation like a George Crumb work. Cole Ingraham’s final piece challenged the audience the most, but the saxophonist Michael Straub played amazingly. The entire piece felt like a crescendo of sounds not usually heard on the saxophone, employing many alternate fingerings and high altissimo range. Cole meanwhile furiously tapped out changes to the electronic component of the piece on his iPad on stage, raising and lowering the levels of pitch areas that flowed from one section to the next.
None of these pieces really followed a ‘traditional’ form that was apparent upon my first listen. But why worry about old-world forms when you’re working with new-world technology? And I’m not trying to advocate a lack of effort or thought behind the composing process either; it takes a ton of work to write and create solid electronic pieces, perhaps even more time than it does to write a nice oboe line. My point (I think) is that many new-music composers, myself included, find it interesting to explore new ways of making music progress through time. Composer and music writer Robert Morris writes in his book of essays The Whistling Blackbird that in our contemporary world, one way to understand a lot of new and challenging music may be to take in the flow of music without having to place so much value on things like form. Or rather, the Form of the music is the Flow of the music. The sounds themselves become the focus, rather than the structures they are laid upon. This could certainly be a good explanation for how musique concrete is produced, cutting and slicing sounds and piecing them together in interesting ways. Electronic music, and a lot of new music as well, may be more about what’s happening in the ‘now’, progressing from one idea (one ‘now’) to the next, unfolding like a scroll. Was that sound interesting? It changed to this other sound now. Now this. Was that change interesting? We can likely remember back to previous moments, and perhaps imagine future trajectories, but perhaps keeping the overall form in our brains is less essential. It can also be good practice for the ears, just taking in what one hears and trying not to place value upon it so quickly. John Cage (one of Morris’s role models) would likely approve of this Zen-like ‘non-judgment’. By listening to more and more electronic music works, I find myself eager and willing to experience the new and unknown.
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