Terms and Topics to Review for the Final Exam:

• scales and chords
• chromatic mediant relationships
• polytonality and pandiatonicism
• rhythm and meter, especially complex meters
• intervals in atonal theory, including:
  • pitch (ordered and unordered)
  • pitch class (ordered and unordered)
  • interval classes
• pitch-class set analysis, (and here) including:
  • normal order
  • prime form
  • interval vector
• serialism and 12-tone composition, including:
  • row forms
  • combinatoriality (hexachordal)
  • derived rows
  • invariance
  • applying serialism to parameters other than pitch, like rhythm, texture, and dynamics (post-WWII)
• timbre and texture, acoustic, including how recent composers have expanded timbral resources for individual instruments and for ensembles.
• electronic music, particularly the difference between concrete music and synthesis
• chance music (indeterminacy), and how it may apply to a particular work or performance (performance, composition, or both)
• minimalism, including primary characteristics

Chance music runs contrary to the prevailing 20th-century tendency towards greater and greater control over musical materials.

There are many words that are mostly interchangeable to refer to chance: indeterminacy, aleatory, and improvisation are the most used. I will mostly used indeterminacy.

There are three ways that music can be indeterminant:

• Indeterminacy with regards to composition
• Indeterminacy with regards to performance
• Indeterminacy with regards to both composition and performance

Indeterminacy can be applied to any musical element: tempo, instrumentation, number of performers, pitch, rhythm, articulation, timbre, texture, etc.

Indeterminacy with Regards to Performance

Indeterminacy with regards to performance can affect large-scale form or local events and musical gestures. Large-scale formal indeterminacy usually involves the ability to play individual sections in a changeable order. This is sometimes called mobile form. Using indeterminacy to create local events and gestures usually involves the use of graphic notation, or other purposefully ambiguous and non-standard notational systems.

John Cage

John Cage is the composer most associated with chance music. For him, chance was a deeply philosophical issue, based largely on two beliefs:

• All sounds are musical. There is no musical difference between the sound coming from a piano and the sound of a truck driving by on the street.
• Zen. Chance was a way for Cage to try to remove his ego from the composition process.

In the context of all sounds being musical, one important element for Cage was to define, ahead of a performance, the length of time that the performance would last. You could say that he needed to frame, or define the time span for his composition as separate from the musical sounds going on all the time.

Also important to Cage is the relationship between sound and silence. Although Cage didn’t believe in absolute silence (there really isn’t such a thing), he did still use the term to relate to inactivity. Sound and silence are like yin and yang to him. One needs the other to exist, and together they form balance.

Minimalism began as a general reaction to post-WWII modernism, atonality, and integral serialism. As such, there are certain traits that one find in minimalist pieces, but the technique is not uniform (just as there are many ways of composing 12-tone music, for example).

Characteristics of minimalism:

• diatonic/modal pitch content
• use of repetition
• short rhythmic cells/patterns
• steady pulse
• the use of process
• often long duration (for works)

Other characteristics appear more in a particular composer.

Phasing is a technique most often used by Steve Reich. Reich will repeat a pattern in multiple instruments, then shift the relationship between the instruments to create changing cross-patterns of accents.

Terry Riley uses drones, ostinatos, and indeterminacy in his minimalist compositions. As Riley is influenced by free jazz, his use of indeterminacy in performance can be seen as relating to jazz.

It should be noted that not all minimalist pieces are tonal/diatonic. Some do not even use pitched material. Diatonicism and tonality are just much more commonly used in minimalism than atonality.

Speaking historically, there are two main approaches to composing electronically. One approach is to manipulate recorded sounds – natural sounds, or simply any sound recorded on tape. This approach is called Concrete Music (musique concrete) because the composer is manipulating actual sound, rather than notation (an abstraction, or representation of sound). The other approach involves using electronic equipment to generate waveforms that produce sound. This approach is called synthesis.

With the development of computer technology, concrete music is enjoying renewed interest. Computers also make it easier to analyze a sound to discover its component parts and manipulate them individually. Synthesizers allow the composer to exert more control over sound and its spectra. Post WWII serialists tended to favor synthesis for the control it offered.

Some Definitions

Timbre refers to tone color. Tone color can be a property of an individual instrument, or of an entire ensemble.

Texture is another one of our fuzzy terms. (“I know it when I see it.”) It generally refers to the relationship between individual parts at a given moment in a composition. The line between texture and timbre can sometimes be unclear.

Timbre as an Extension of Instrumental Resources

The expansion of timbral resources comes about from two main areas of usage: expanded use of percussion instruments and extended techniques for individual instruments. For percussion instruments, the use of non-pitched percussion is especially prevalent. For individual instruments, extended techniques generally refer to any form of playing an instrument that isn’t part of the standard classical/romantic performance technique. For wind instruments this can include flutter tonguing, multi-phonics, key slaps, and similar techniques. String instruments can use different bowing techniques, and expanded pizzicato methods.

Timbre and Texture as a Compositional Resource

Compositionally, timbre and texture can be used in a variety of ways. We studied two main ways: Klanfarben Melodie (Tone Color Melody), and sound mass composition. Tone color melody involves the change of timbre as a compositional focus. Sound mass composition involves the use of chords where the focus is on the totality of the chord itself, instead of the individual interval content. Ligeti used clusters of minor seconds with the belief that if you stacked enough seconds you stopped hearing the interval.

Since very few of you know who Frank Zappa is, I’m including a few YouTube videos that highlight different facets of his very extended personality.

Zappa performing Inca Roads, something of an experimental jazz-rock fusion. Zappa is playing the guitar solo, and periodically conducting. (Besides the standard long black hair and mustache, Zappa is the one with the foot-long face.)

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Something a little more tongue-in-cheek, his typical rock style. A performance of Montana

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And you can wade into the 1980s debate over obscene lyrics and rock videos, with Zappa as a guest on the CNN show Crossfire. (note: “on the right” that’s Robert Novak, who helped out Valerie Plame)