Musical Structure

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I really don't understand this reasoning at all. Nothing has to be thought out at the start. Same with literature. There are as many ways of (dis)organising the creation process as there are artists.

One of my very few magnum opi is a Theme and Variations fro piano. The thing is - I composed Variation 3 before anything else, and the rest just followed. I've tinkered with it over the years (since 1973) but I've not found much I don't like (apart from the theme, which is only 12 bars long, with an ugly gear change in the middle).

[Richard Barrett]

The thing is - I composed Variation 3 before anything else, and the rest just followed.

Exactly. More generally, one might start with the aspect of the work which at the outset is most clear in one's mind, which might be the beginning, or it might be some other part (or it might be intended as a beginning and end up somewhere else, etc.), or it might be more to do with the overall structure, or with choosing a sung text, or deciding on an instrumentation, or by deciding in advance what order the various convergent processes of composition might be done in, or some combination of the above possibilities, or something else entirely. But describing a compositional process is a bit like describing a dream - you can't really be clear, even to yourself, about the order in which ideas and decisions took place.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and the opening movement of his second symphony are good examples of how a composer turned his initial ideas inside out.

[ahinton]

Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and the opening movement of his second symphony are good examples of how a composer turned his initial ideas inside out.

Good points indeed from both you and RB. Another example of this kind of thing, which I know to what I suppose must hve been my cost, is starting out on something when you think you have a pretty good idea of the overall shape and design of the whole without necessarily all the details worked out, only to find not so much that things might be in the wrong (or not best) place but that awful realisation "but I just can't see this through", followed by consigning the partially completed score into cold storage for the foreseeable future; it's happened to me several times and, fortunately, it's all come right in the end in all but one case where I decided that the game simply wasn't worth the candle, so to speak.

I think that Elgar would have understood the general thrust of all of this as well as anyone, given his habit of carrying a sketch book around with him and jotting down ideas whenever they occurred to him without the faintest idea of when or even whether he might make us of them; in some cases, these might sit there for a couple of decades before being purloined for incorporation into a work that he'd not have had any idea at the time that he would write.

For what are perhaps much more extreme cases, one has only to go to a couple of other symphonies - Sibelius's Fifth and Shostakovich's Fourth - to see just how different the end results were to their original conceptions.

[vinteuil]

I think that Elgar would have understood the general thrust of all of this as well as anyone, given his habit of carrying a sketch book around with him and jotting down ideas whenever they occurred to him without the faintest idea of when or even whether he might make us of them; in some cases, these might sit there for a couple of decades before being purloined for incorporation into a work that he'd not have had any idea at the time that he would write.

... interesting : Alexander Pope similarly - he would write down couplets as they occurred to him, and when a Poem was required he would look to his collection of 'here's one I prepared earlier' lines.

As Richd: Barrett indicates, there are as many different approaches as there are composers / writers. Proust just went on adding and adding and adding - had he not died when he did la Recherche wd have grown even more absurdly long. By contrast a writer like Perec constructed his masterwork [ La Vie mode d'emploi (Life a user's manual)] on the basis of a manically rigorous series of schemes and constraints, where the Form was a predetermining armature without which the work wd have no sense.

[Richard Barrett]

Proust just went on adding and adding and adding - had he not died when he did la Recherche wd have grown even more absurdly long. By contrast a writer like Perec constructed his masterwork [ La Vie mode d'emploi (Life a user's manual)] on the basis of a manically rigorous series of schemes and constraints, where the Form was a predetermining armature without which the work wd have no sense.

We have to be careful to distinguish between the structure of the composition process and the structure of the composition, however. In the two cases you mention, the process is more or less closely related to the reader's experience. Staying with French literature, though, a counterexample could be the novels of Raymond Roussel, where what might seem on the surface to be an outpouring of hallucinatory images turns out to rely on a complex system of wordplays, at least that's what I remember from having read them many years ago. Likewise, in music, sometimes the relationship between the composition process and the composition is more or less what it seems to be, other times not. (There's an anecdote of Stockhausen following Feldman around demanding to know what his "system" was, and not accepting the answer that there wasn't one!)

[greenilex]

Do people think organic is a useful word when applied to decisions about form?

[french frank]

I really don't understand this reasoning at all. Nothing has to be thought out at the start. Same with literature. There are as many ways of (dis)organising the creation process as there are artists.

I concede that I was thinking - in mentioning painting - of the composition rather than the process of creation, and it seems self-evident that no artist has to do anything in that process. But I was taking it that for the composer, the turns of the evolving thought remain part of the final work and are the structure of the composition as it is heard - and followed - by the listeners, whereas in a completed painting there is no evolution for the participating observer. How it finishes up will not necessarily be in accordance with some preconceived idea, but that doesn't alter the situation.

I did wonder whether in the extracted quote in the OP, "the artist" was referring to himself. It seems he was talking about the inspiration that he had taken from Matisse (and Ingres), and that he himself had similar 'techniques'. What he actually said was:

"I enjoy and identify with the idea that no matter how intricate or unpredictable the twists and turns of a piece of work, the artist must first erect the invisible, objective structures that support their material like scaffolding supports the construction of a building." So he wasn't actually laying down the law as to how 'artists' do, or should, work, but describing his own personal reaction to the idea. Which I take it he may.

[Richard Barrett]

I was taking it that for the composer, the turns of the evolving thought remain part of the final work and are the structure of the composition as it is heard - and followed - by the listeners

I don't think that can be assumed at all, not only in the obvious case of an aleatoric or improvisational composition where no sinngle composer has decided on the order of things. Also, the difference between, on one hand, "identifying with the idea" that there are things an artist "must" do, and, on the other, believing there are things an artist "must" do, isn't such an enormous one, even if the original quotation made the statement look more prescriptive than it may have been intended to be, although indeed it was the statement as quoted that Alison invited us to "discuss" of course, how's that for a tortuous sentence?

[Serial_Apologist]

... thank you for the clarification; I think I have been mis-reading your #31.

But are you saying that by privileging certain kinds of Bourdieusian cultural capital the powers-that-be in the hierarchy - " imputing intrinsically superior values to certain ways of thinking and organising musical form over others" - really have an effect in re-inforcing alienation among the 'common folk', - making "us distrustful of our motives and each other, and liable to keep looking to "higher authorities" as being society's standard-bearers"?

I don't see that those who enjoy rock, pop, rap, grime, garage and other such 'non-privileged' art-forms are liable to look up to the "higher authorities" - "society's standard bearers" may indeed haunt Glyndebourne and the crush-bar at the Royal Opera House, but I don't think their cultural tastes impinge on your 'common folk'.

That's a hard one to answer, vints, given how the specifics peculiar to pop cultural forms which have been generated in different parts of the world have impacted on how composers of today understand their relationship to matters of form and handed-down traditions.

There's a strong tendency that is anti-elitist in the worst sense, as french frank and others have put it, of which writing off the Western concert hall and operatic music traditions as being redolent of the spirit of entitlement to impose superior aesthetic values used to justify the Western bourgeoisie's imposition of modernism on the rest of the world in the name of capitalist expansionism, forms an important starting point from which to consider this whole question. More enlightened late 19th and early 20th century minds discovered through the very process of colonialism that Western aesthetics were by no means superior to those of other lands as their Christian forbears had once seen it as part of their mission ov civilisation to overcome - as the influence of eg Gamelan on Debussy and Arabic musics on Bartok and others made clear - while at the same time (or, rather, later in the story) popular culture proved a profitable means of diversion, one which could be conveyed as anti-elitist inasmuch as epitomising the benefits of choice in a free, efficient self-regulatory market place. It cannot be coincidental that, barring its outward appearances, eg production tweakings, dress codes etc., mainstream pop has remained essentially unchanged since the 1960s, when in its most creative period due to musicians still having control over record companies, groups including the Beatles and the Beach Boys were doing what jazz had always done and continues at its best to do, namely taking what they needed from aspects of what modern classical composers were doing and using this on their music's own terms. My own feeling is that, since then, whatever originality and progress has been achieved from within the post rock'n'roll tradition has been against, not the classical music establishment, but against the power and money of the entertainment music industry. Pop cannot change in its inner essentials, trapped within the harmonically limited prison of its own making as it is by its function in restricting mass taste and therefrom the imagination engendered in ebnough people to seek to question and change things, to think beyond what boardroom occupants deem saleable.

In my estimation the rise of the Punk labels such as Rough Trade at the end of the 1970s, taking up from the example of the immediately preceding free music co-operatives - an attempt by groups to re-gain control from the formulators and ratings fixers of mass taste - continued with the establishing of labels like Warp Records in the 1990s taking up where musicians like Aphex Twin were advancing what had become known as Electronica on the possibilities Hip Hop and Techno had discovered in the electronic music pioneered in 1950s Darmstadt and Milan etc., by way of early Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass, initially making use of the comparatively cheap user-friendly synths, drum machines and samplers imported from Japan.

Returning to thread topic, the way I see it, traditional form, eg sonata, canon, passacaglia etc. acquire the symbolic status of simulacra in an age in which the value to the individual or group of durablility or amenability to modification on a domestic scale cedes to the ever-growing speed of technological advance aiding ever-faster product turnover taking place elsewhere according to criteria whose consequences unfold beyond control on the local scale except as rearguard action. The forms that are made to evoke supposedly stabler past eras assume the symbolic status of iconic models offered as part of wealth of "lessons of history" to be cherry-picked, dissociated, from their original sociopolitical matrix, and used for their associative resonance - rather in the way the English post-Arts & Crafts Morrisian generation of composers led by Holst and RVW, and the English Folk Song Society and their folkish successors, who might be considered harbingers of what would one day be dissed as hippy-dippy escapism, idealised the pre-industrial national past - to try to re-create, in the face of the faceless bureaucracy and planners' distopian visions for our post-communitarian late capitalist societies. The associative power and richness of those Western artistic forms, in music as represented in the evolution from late Mediaeval polyphony to serialism and stochasm, becomes meanwhile the perceived preserve of orders overseeing a protectorate of little if any relevance to the overarching issues of today.

My defense of jazz as representing what remains of that modernist vision, expressed through the greatest musical artifacts of the 20th century, rests on that particular music's evolving its own means of surviving its own schism with its half-forgotten suppressed past in another land by taking on board what it needed from that modernist viewpoint while, at the same time, establishing, reconfigured, a convivial context outwith the confines the concert hall in which at least musical progress, and what it can potentially represent in the wider scheme of things, can proceed.

[french frank]

I don't think that can be assumed at all, not only in the obvious case of an aleatoric or improvisational composition where no sinngle composer has decided on the order of things.

If I cut out the word 'thought' and replace 'composer' by 'listener'? Alea iacta est. Or is that an example of 'non-structure'?

Also, the difference between, on one hand, "identifying with the idea" that there are things an artist "must" do, and, on the other, believing there are things an artist "must" do, isn't such an enormous one, even if the original quotation made the statement look more prescriptive than it may have been intended to be, although indeed it was the statement as quoted that Alison invited us to "discuss" of course, how's that for a tortuous sentence?

Proust would be proud of you. 'to model oneself on, now esp. unconsciously; to feel oneself to be, or to become, closely associated with or part of': I think he just meant, 'It's what I do because I like it'.

[Richard Barrett]

Do people think organic is a useful word when applied to decisions about form?

Many people do, but I have to say I'm not among them, preferring the use of terms which are less ill-defined. Something like "organic" can be used to mean whatever one wants it to.

[Richard Barrett]

If I cut out the word 'thought' and replace 'composer' by 'listener'?

Again I'm not at all sure what you mean. I do think though that listening, for those who are aware of and interested in the kinds of issues we're talking about here, isn't just a question of following a structure but actually of participating in it.

[french frank]

isn't just a question of following a structure but actually of participating in it.

You're probably dealing here with the least creative mind to be found this side of Pedants Anonymous. That immediately sent me to the OED to see what could be implied by 'to participate', without much luck. The only thing I could come up with was that Mozart piece that involves throwing dice - it was recorded by, I think, Neville Marriner and someone else.

[teamsaint]

Again I'm not at all sure what you mean. I do think though that listening, for those who are aware of and interested in the kinds of issues we're talking about here, isn't just a question of following a structure but actually of participating in it.

There's a great deal to be gained by at least trying to participate in the structure, as you put it, or to adopt deliberately, even if unconvinced, a different critical approach to elements such as structure. This might include trying to raise our own awareness of our own participation in the process, and also of the previously unquestioned beliefs that we bring to the work, or process of listening/reading.