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[kwcsoundcultures2017]

FINAL ASSIGNMENT: “UNTITLED (RED ON ORANGE) (1956)”

This final assignment for Sound Cultures expands on my current fascination with combining severely abstract music with “field recordings”. Thinking about the “field” always makes me think of Rothko and how, when looking at a Rothko my hearing changes, sometimes to the point of ignoring all the sounds around me and at other times making me hyper-attentive to them.

I find it very easy to stand and watch what the painting referred to in my title does in my eyes. It is a reason I chose to come to Melbourne after a decade in NZ. It’s one of the best of the 50-plus Rothkos I have seen in the flesh over the years but last time I saw it was just after I left work for the last time (which was featured in my last work for Sound Cultures around “narrative”) and I was highly stressed. The painting seemed different, almost accusatory in its silence. I had my Tascam recorder with me. So I set it on the ground and just watched the painting do its thing, which usually takes about 10 minutes of observation before the colours start to move and shift against one another. I made a recording about 13 minutes in length and edited it down into a “field” with especially coughing as “interruptions” or as “triggers” for events in the composition itself. In my experience coughing occurs in concerts at precisely the “worst” times and so I decided to use these randomly timed events as “triggers” for certain compositional events.

This piece of course questions what the “composition” really is: is it this recording? is it just the piano parts? If encountered “live” one would of course hear a great deal of mechanical noise and noises made by the audience. But I like how ambiguously the question is posed in this recording.

The idea was to simulate a pair of closely wedged together player pianos that would be “excited into action” by the noise of spectators in the gallery. If you slow down the player piano parts I wrote and invert the velocity response it basically sounds like those Feldman works for multiple pianos moving at different speeds through the same materials so the idea of coupling the “sublime silence” of a Rothko with something defiantly brutal and mechanical tickled my fancy.

The composition itself builds itself up three times in slightly different ways and in two distinct temporal layers. At the pitch level one layer is the almost exact inversion of the other but temporally they are related by the proportion 10:11 (ie. if one layer has 10 events in a time-period T, the other layer has 11 events in that same period). I made a 12 note serial figure from the all-interval series of Stockhausen’s Gruppen (roughly contemporaneous with the painting). I then built it up from 2 all the way to 12 notes and “dropped” the notes in the order in which they are introduced so you get a figural “code” like this (T = 10 and E = 11 D = 12):

12 123 1234 12345 123456 1234567 12345678 123456789 123456789T 123456789TE 123456789TED 23456789TED 3456789TED 456789TED 56789TED 6789TED 789TED 89TED 9TED TED ED (ETC)

Then, because I wanted “holes” in both parts I deleted every F# from one piano part and every F from the other. Each piano part then had little holes in it as each only presents 11 of the 12 possible pitches but the holes differ in placement and probability from section to section.

The point of this process is of course that the figure that obsesses each of the two parts is gradually revealed and then transformed gradually into something else. It relates closely but is not identical to the process Ligeti uses in “Continuum” for solo harpsichord, where he uses the fact that our ear notices repetition of pitches easily so a complex melodic figure can actually sound like overlapped repeated individual pitches. Ligeti keeps to a single tempo (being for a single performer) so I wanted to bring this into Nancarrow territory by having the two temporal processes polyrhythmically related and this also means that there are figures you hear in the result which are made by the contrapuntal relation of the two primary layers rather than by a single instrument. Even though the music seems very repetitive there is very little exact repetition because of this polyrhythmic/polytemporal aspect and also notes are being added to or subtracted from the figures played. Because notes are constantly being added or subtracted the figures can sometimes create the effect of acceleration or deceleration in spite of the actual tempos remaining perfectly constant across the whole piece.

The two “player piano” parts are presented with very little dynamic variation (there’s actually a lot of subtle differentiation by register because I scaled the velocity sensitivity differently for each of the two piano parts to bring out certain “resultant” figures in the bass) because with dynamic variation you lose the insistently mechanical character of the piece and also it makes sure that the kinds of “resultant” figure I was interested in don’t get lost in dynamic variations of attention. The very end of one piano part (which is 10% faster and therefore 10% shorter) was removed and re-introduced at the very end after a brief “solo” from the slower part so the “new” gesture that finishes the piece was exactly synchronised before we hear again the “silence” of the gallery where I was standing in front of that beautiful painting. It’s interesting to me how you hear it differently after all those notes and after all that “compressed” feeling of time rushing along without you.

This is the link to the piece.

https://soundcloud.com/keith-w-clancy/untitled-red-on-orange-1956

[kwcsoundcultures2017]

TEO MACERO

Thinking more about improvisation and recording makes me think of how Macero produced the famous Miles Davis records. One of my favorites of them is “In a Silent Way” but the repetition of the “header” of the first piece at the end before going to the second side has always really bothered me. It feels wrong to revert to material that has been exceeded by what went before it. It’s clearly a kind of “da capo” or ABA structure (the way that much of jazz seems absolutely wedded to very simplistic formal procedures, such as the alternation of “solos” in order of decreasing importance is a big weakness in the music itself for me) but it just feels wrong to use exactly the same take. I would have asked them to re-perform and re-record it, and thereby to make different decisions the second time in terms of the voicing of the chords on organs and electric pianos or in terms of the phrasing of the trumpet part etc. Perhaps this is why I love those re-issues of the entire recording sessions for many of these albums (and also why I like the remixes by Bill Laswell) as its shows alternative formal paths the pieces could have taken.

[kwcsoundcultures2017]

IMPROVISATION

This was a funny class in some ways. I do have a great many problems with the ways in which “improvisation” is conceived. I think its relation to the very problematic question of “freedom” is a massive blind spot in how it is theorised by much of the material I’ve read. I also think that the distinction between notated music and improvised music is also radically mis-thought by much of what I have read.

If I could play the piano I would want to be able to play the Goldberg Variations, not simply because I love them but because the former features repeats of each half of each variation which demand to be embellished (my embellishments of the Aria in the only part of it I can play are ridiculously fancy). In baroque music “variation” form meant the invention of melodic variations upon a ground of a sequence of harmonies. So in a way the “freedom” implied by that idea is constrained by the rules of harmony and the chord progressions under the surface of the music. This exact same structure applies to much of jazz, even “free jazz” or “modal jazz” where only harmonies are prescribed in any way.

Now we might think of someone sitting down and performing the “Goldberg Variations” as being “unfree” but only the succession of significant pitch structures are specified. Everything else, the tempi, the rhythmic articulation, embellishments etc are not in fact fully specified and in effect “improvised” (within limits but given the actual variation in tempo you see even in what sounds “mechanical” those limits are actually relatively wide). One of my side projects is the creation of MIDI performances of extremely difficult to perform the late Beethoven piano sonatas where I’ve been certain that no one gets the rhythms I can see on the page to fly out into the air. The interesting thing about this process is seeing that a pianist like Pollini, Levit or Rosen is sometimes virtually identical to the MIDI performance but celebrated pianists like Barenboim or Rubenstein are sometimes comically “wrong” rhythmically (I’m thinking in particular of the fast variations of the “Arietta” of Opus 111 which should sound like ragtime). So it’s instructive that we think of both classes of performances as “non-improvisational” when at the temporal level there is a great deal of “freedom” in the performance of notated (”non-improvised”) music. let’s not forget either that at least in the 18th/19th centuries a great deal of notated music is intended to be “improvisational” in character and could indeed be improvised. There are many moments in the late Beethoven piano works which are meant to sound like improvisation and Bach, for example, was famed for being able to improvise incredibly complex fugues at the keyboard on subjects given to him in real life. There are also senses in which to NOT improvise embellishments in Baroque and early classical period music is in fact to NOT perform the printed music adequately so a slavishly “accurate” performance of only the notes on the page is in fact not at all accurate (rules around apoggiaturas and cadenzas in Handel and Mozart for example would fit in here).

At the same time, the rock-solid rhythmic grounding of Coleman’s “Free Jazz” in the double rhythm sections means that the effect of “freedom” is also constrained in the opposite direction: Beethoven is constrained at the pitch level but freer at the temporal level, Coleman is free-ish at the pitch level (it’s very clearly modal, in 12 tone equal temperament and not free atonality) whilst very constrained at the rhythmic level.

All of this is simply to show that the questions around “improvisation” are not simple, in fact they are probably the most complex questions in music. In thinking of notation and improvisation as a zero-sum game you cannot ultimately keep them apart or keep the distinction a hard and fast one. If we start thinking of improvisation as a domain without habit/repetition/constraint the “freedom” implied by improvisation automatically becomes ideological in nature. I know some musicians who see the entirety of the history of notated music as a mistake because somehow “improv” or “sound art” or “abstract sound” is some new domain of untrammeled freedom (and not at all aware either of just how habituated/rehearsed their own “free invention” is).

“Freedom” is also just a really dodgy concept to apply to art given the unresolvable problems inherent in the concept itself. Art might be the closest thing to “authentic” freedom we have in a radically unfree society (such as we have under late capitalism) but to hypostatise that very restricted and ultimately safe aesthetic freedom is to make “free improvisation” into an ideological mask for real material unfreedom.

[kwcsoundcultures2017]

NANCARROW

It was great to hear Nancarrow in a lecture in this course. He is not just an ethical hero for me (he fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War) but an example of someone sticking to his guns without even thinking of how or whether his work might be “understood”. The wit and humour of his works for player piano have been a constant source of inspiration for me.

I’ve also come to see them as “symptoms” in some way.

During the lecture, whilst looking up the brilliant and disturbing works of Wolffli, I came across a book that I later bought, on the relation of psychosis to art. In it the author talks about obsessional numbering schemes and the like as a defense against trauma. Suddenly I imagined that the “humourous” quality of a machine running out of control or going crazy that I hear in the player piano studies could easily be interpreted as a reaction to the trauma of mechanised warfare. As if Nancarrow was using the highly technical language of the player piano to derive something else from technology than death and destruction.

Ligeti’s post-war works (and those of Stockhausen and Xenakis) all share an obsession with “morse-code” rhythms on fixed pitches, algorithmic techniques of transformation, mechanical birdsongs, all kinds of ”twittering machines” with these Nancarrow works. I’ve always read the Post WWII avant-garde as symptomatic of historical trauma (and this is the reason why they become an important source of post-WWII horror/thriller film music just as late-romantic music is a source for melodramatic pre-1945 film music): in other words, the emphasis on technique, serialism, atonality, dissonance, experimentation, anti-romanticism, mechanisation, breakage or rupture that you see in post-1945 art music is not merely a “musical” issue (this is of course exactly how it was defensively presented by the composers themselves), it is entirely about the traumatic wounds “civilisation” inflicted upon itself, including the attack on the very concept of “culture” that fascism enacted. As a reaction to the wound inflicted upon the concept of “civilisation” by the two original “homes” of western music itself (Italy and Germany), the language of those civilisations is itself wounded and traumatised by musical technologies (serialism and chance procedures are almost identical technologies of “dehumanisation”) that repeat, in a mediated form, the atomisation of people in Dresden, Auschwitz and Hiroshima. I hear this in Nancarrow now as well: the machine is hysterical, unable to give voice to the traumatic reversal of civilisation into its opposite so it responds by exacerbating the technological exceeding of perception. Here is a machine proudly superseding the “human” because isn’t that what the middle of last century screams at us? that “the human” is nothing? This is a deeply inhuman music that preserves humanity by denying it, it preserves “expression” by hyper-mediating it to the point that it starts to be readable as a critique of the tendencies that made it possible in the first place.

The fact that Nancarrow does this in the space of a three minute pop song with appropriated “jazz” materials makes these works all the more fascinating to me. One of my major thoughts in general is that music is not at all ever “abstract”, its historical situation is its content even (especially!) when the music appears to deny that and a historical situation can radically change the meaning of music. 

Basically I read all of music through an Adornian lens because I think it’s the most musical way to think about what music actually does rather than what we think it ought to do: far too much weight has been placed upon composerly intention when what music actually does is sometimes nothing to do with it. This is why thinking of music as a “hysterical/historical symptom” has become attractive to me.

[kwcsoundcultures2017]

Narrative Piece

That was an interesting task as it made me realise I’ve very often had implicit narratives to a lot of my work. something i had not thought of before really. These narratives can even be related to one another as well

All of the work I’m doing in the three courses this semester can be combined, they all come from the one theoretical and procedural position if you like

I consider all of them fragments in the sense of the romantic fragment, that each is an attempt, sometimes to do the one thing, several ways, each an attempt towards an impossible whole

It makes sense then to think of all these pieces as forming a whole rather cinematic narrative about contemporary and historical ideas about life, sex, power and death and the politics thereof explored in multiple ways including intense musical variation of appropriated material

my works for Sound Cultures this year have all continued a series which were about the sounds and thoughts and feelings evoked by all the places between where I worked nights and various homes, including modes of transport and spaces in or nearby to home, including parks where I do a lot of bird recordings and the porno cinema where I worked and had some terrible experiences - all of these pieces bring together recordings of music in real life - in the new piece I’m doing now there’s a person who walked past carrying one of those annoying ghetto blasters

turning those experiences into work this semester has been good to do

[kwcsoundcultures2017]

ROBBE-GRILLET

It was a great experience to be reminded of how much I like Robbe-Grillet by the short excerpt from “The Man who Lies” in the class this semester. My favorite of his works is still the script for Last Year at Marienbad where all of his favored themes and techniques are married to the amazing performance of Delphine Seyrig and Resnais as metteur en scene. I’ve been watching bits and pieces of Robbe-Grillet’s other films where I can find them since seeing that opening sequence. It’s interesting to see how influential some of these once very “avant-garde” ideas have been in popular/commercial cinema. That’s not just because of their works having become staples of training in Film Studies but I suspect because something about the fractured text speaks to what seems like a very fractured world, where paranoia and suspicion are logical responses to a sense that “we” are not “in control” and cannot ever be. In a post-Truth era like ours supposedly is “Last Year” and “The Man who Lies” (and perhaps even more so, “Trans-Europ Express”) look remarkably “up to date”, like they were predicting a growing lack of faith in the grand narratives of man as the centre of a meaningful universe etc. they all feature deception and fiction metatextually commenting upon itself, the scripted narration is so descriptive it is announcing itself as literature, the repetitions are fascinating, the way afterwards all you think about are those words and how they get deep into your memory on one or two viewings. but there is no centre to the film as a whole, all of which could be in some ways reflected in an immanent critique of the figure of the artist as hero, there’s nothing much heroic about this guy, despite being played by such an actor, he comes to seem a bit pathetic really

[kwcsoundcultures2017]

SINKING OF THE TITANIC

In some ways an incredibly sentimental piece I do like one thing about this work: it is fundamentally a concept or a mise en scene first of all, and only subsequently a “musical work” or a “score”. Increasingly I’m thinking that I want to explore the multiple ways that a single formal idea could be realised, without making a permanent choice between different possibilities. So a piece could have layers added to or subtracted from it without fundamentally altering the nature of a piece. Or else a work could exist in multiple versions. Much of my recent piano (technically player-piano) music can have its internal harmonic relations radically and easily shifted whilst retaining the same temporal structures (an explicit inversion of the “normal” order of things in notated and humanly realised music where the succession of vertical harmoniues are fixed but the timing of their sequence is in fact entirely free). As for other works that rhyme with this one I think the William Basinski disintegration loops perform the concept of sinking or drowning more effectively than this work, which always had the smell of “little england” to me (and of course is coloured now by that execrable film). Sometimes you learn more from works that are not quite fully realised according to one’s own aesthetic but which allow you to break out of a particular comfort zone.

[kwcsoundcultures2017]

CENTRAL PARK IN THE DARK

Ives is an important figure for me, primarily because of his nearly constant usage of a layered conception of form in composition: many compositions are like this one, spatially and musically stratified. Here a sequence of gentle figures in the strings form a kind of environment for soloistic interruptions. Even when performed by an ensemble in an entirely standard layout there is a spatiality to the sound. I also particularly admire Ives’ usage of distorted quotation and the usage of out of tune pianos to alienate any tendency towards treating the sound as merely abstraction. Ives is in many ways a “musique concrete” composer before his time, de-emphasising the role of precise notation or tuning in favour of a collage of disparate elements all jostling for your attention. It is also perhaps one reason why for me his music sounds so much like the places that are evoked in his writings and titles. This is music not as discourse or rhetoric but as mise en scene.

[kwcsoundcultures2017]

MIKROPHONIE I

This is still a huge influence on my ways of working and thinking (I’ve also sampled bits of it sometimes as a source of “sonic atoms”). In this piece Stockhausen notationally describes and prescribes a series of actions on the metal surface of a large tam-tam that are treated with varying means of excitation, microphone placement and filtering. Even though Cage had already subjected conventional classical music instruments to kinds of modification and amplification in this work Stockhausen brings so much rich thinking to bear upon everything about the instrument itself that this one work in some ways invents a genre of music: an object, excited by a small group of people in various ways, recorded or amplified from various perspectives, and relayed to an audience who can see and hear the actions and their results (it really is a piece that needs to be seen in live performance to be most effective). Nearly all “live electronic music” or “noise music” derives in part from this work. Sadly I think a lot of subsequent work in this genre lacks the thoroughgoing reconceptualisation of the sounding object and its relation to a silent, rationalising notational/compositional practice that we find in this work. Part of the meaning of the piece, especially when seen in performance, is the fact that the performers are not improvising (despite the expected presence of indeterminacy in result - the tam-tam is not a piano! - every action of the players is prescribed by the composer) but the audience cannot necessarily understand the processes being enacted upon the object. Even with a copy of the score it is not possible to imagine the results in the mind (in the way that is relatively easy with Stockhausen’s piano music for example) and so the performance has the quality of a secret ritual.

[kwcsoundcultures2017]

SYMPHONY OF SIRENS

In this work we find interesting points of connection between the “revolutionary” materialist aesthetic of Russian constructivism and the Fascist aesthetic of mechanised, synchronised mass-action. Avraamov intended that the piece would be an example of “proletarian art” in the sense that the control of the piece is not centralised in subjective “expression” (counterpoint this to say Wagner where a single subjectivity controls virtually the entire field of sound and vision).

The most obvious thing to me is the removal of “spectatorship” from the piece. Everyone involved were (ideally at least) participants. But of course what comes out over the next few decades in Germany is a reconceptualisation of the social totality as participatory (at least at a “socio-cultural” level): the total mobilisation of society as aesthetic warfare in fascism.

This makes me more than a little suspicious of the truly “revolutionary” character of the Symphony of Sirens. It celebrates a “genuine revolution” but can also only ever be secondary to the events of 1917 and in some ways the “failure” of this piece is revealing from a historical standpoint: just as the energies and ideas of the original revolution ended up being repeated in inverted form under Stalinism, the failure to enact a similar musical revolution in this piece is amusingly apt. I think this is something that drives the recent interest in post-revolutionary music in Russia, where virtually every current idea in contemporary composition was experimented with: those ideas look a little nostalgic to us now given that neither thinkers, nor artists seriously seek to change the entirety of existence and culture in the ways they did once. We look back now at these “innocent” hopes with a wistful gaze, given that in the intervening period we have witnessed the horrifying costs of the “redesigning of everyday life” that we see in the concentration camp and the suicide bomber.

[kwcsoundcultures2017]

JUST DESERTS

1 STOCKHAUSEN: “Kontakte” (1959-60) stereo version with piano and percussion played by David Tudor and Christoph Caskel (WERGO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhdEUbj0mgQ   I had this on LP and I found it thanks to my high school art teacher who played to me once the LP of the electronic part alone. So I have listened to this piece for more than 30 years and I know it by heart, possibly better than any other piece of music. It took until September 2001 for me to hear it live in 4 channels and in real space. It remains for me the perfect masterpiece of 20th century electronic music and the version with live musicians making “contact” with alien transmissions appealed to me immediately as the two sonic strata are so beautifully related and distinct. The way that so much of the piece puts the completely familiar (piano) against sometimes completely unearthly timbres possibly suggested to me a way of conceiving music as incomprehensible dialogue with non-human sources. Stockhausen analysed the spectra of especially percussion sounds in order to imitate them electronically and to gain harmonic structures from them. These pitch structures seem to my ear at least to be strongly supported by the piano part sometimes even though the latter is also obviously equal tempered and serial in character. The spectralist strand in music so important to me now is sometimes polemically regarded as an "anti-serial" impulse but spectralism also clearly connects to the early Stockhausen of the 1950s at the conceptual and often the sonic levels as well. Many of the more complex timbres were constructed from purely rhythmic sequences of blank impulses edited together, multitracked and sped up so that rhythms become more or less complex sounds with more or less discernible pitch. The rhythms of these micro-sequences are in some cases identical to the rhythms they are later used to “play”. I find its exploration of a self-similarity between different temporal strata of the work deeply interesting. This is a fully serial but not dogmatically applied synthesis technique and this piece is the only implementation I know of in this form, given the nature of the studio of the time. He never used this laborious and unique synthesis method again but I have derived great inspiration from it. Once Stockhausen discovered synthesisers I find his work a great deal less interesting (I sat all the way through the silliness of a live performance "Sirius" just so I could hear the rotations at the very opening and ending which are the only parts of the piece that interest me). My interest in granular synthesis, polyrhythms related by ratios by analogy with the proportions of the harmonic series, and the spatial movement of sound; all these also come I believe from Kontakte, Gruppen and other works of the 50s. It was this piece that repeatedly drummed into me the fact that all elements of sound (except for amplitude and spatial location) are resolvable into temporal structures: rhythm, harmony, timbre and form are all different ways of experiencing/manipulating sensations in and as time. This makes sense given that what we perceive as “sound” is the more or less periodic fluctuations in local air pressure, compressions and rarefactions of air in waves through time: a “noise” is random fluctuations (which is why white noise can be a source of random fluctuations) and, at the opposite end, the sine wave is a perfectly periodic, simple harmonic motion realised as regular changes in the air.

Time beats silently at the heart of sound: all sound is the way the air behaves in time, it is the rhythm of that behaviour, its choreography.

Rhythm therefore colours a sound on the spectrum between noise and the sine tone: the latter would be a simple regular beating whereas the former would imply complete aperiodicity. In Kontakte (Contacts) Stockhausen is clearly working with a kind of continuum between white noise and the pure frequency of the sine tone and this implies a scale of temporal levels as well, expressed here as a conceptual identity between the large scale “phraseological” time-stratum and the “nano-temporality” of the individual timbres conceived as the “deposit” of strata at different speeds corresponding to partials, a technique he applied to notated material in "Gruppen" from earlier in the 50s. This “temporal reductionism” is also a way of thinking about how to construct sound at the microscopic level and this has dominated all of my subsequent musical thinking and probably accounts for habit of determining the timing of events and scale of a piece right from the start. The treatment of rhythm and the timing of large forms is an area of intense theoretical and practical research for me still and nearly everything I’ve ever done, including my visual work, could be traced back to the 13 year old kid from the western suburbs being taken on this alien journey. 2 GAGAKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoKP-o-cXak I discovered this music again in my teen years. I would spend hours nearly every Saturday morning poring through second hand LPs at the various stores in Sydney in the 80s. Ashwoods had a huge selection of classical music from non-western sources. Gagaku immediately attracted me as it was an obvious source of inspiration for composers like Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen ("Der Jahreslauf" is basically ersatz gagaku) and Messiaen. In gagaku the instruments rub up, grind against one another, few if any notes are left “straight”: it is a music of deviations and nuances in pitch, timing and timbre that I still find very beautiful. This is a world-obliterating sound: not at all a delicate “orientalist” fantasy music but raw, implacable, intense and rough. I still find it influences me, especially the sense of timing, I like the long slow builds of its piercing high chords on reeds and pipes which sound like FM synthesis, or a harmonica, or high harmonics in strings in orchestral works by Ligeti, Penderecki, Xenakis, Haas, Cerha and the spectralist composers generally. You could create an orchestral genealogy of this figure of the “screaming high register string texture” throughout much of the 20th century and compare it to how earlier composers like Beethoven, Mahler, Ravel, Debussy or Wagner represented the spaciousness and timelessness of nature with slow high violin lines, as if comparing the vertical polar space of the frequency spectrum with 3d effects of depth and height and breadth. And then ask yourself what happened? Auschwitz and Hiroshima is what I would respond with. Of course what strikes us as “ugly” and therefore expressive means something very different to the mediaeval Japanese connoisseurs of this music: it would be interesting to know what it sounded like to its audience centuries ago. But I always think of the effect that such a truly “other” music to us here in the 21st century can still have as a goal to strive for: this music still makes sense in a gestural and ritualistic way, where it seems the act of playing is as important as what results, even if we don’t recognise all the resonances, nuances or the harmonies. We hear that something serious is being said even if we cannot understand it fully: along with recordings and scores of John Cage, Sylvano Busotti, Pierre Boulez and others where one never feels fully confident one could ever fully “understand” this sense of joy in confusion or excess is something I aim for. The parts of my own works that I enjoy best are those that appear grotesque, monstrous or even campily excessive in either notational complexity, texture or, increasingly the case, (de)tuning. For me the avant-garde of the post war era, which also I think helped me open my ears also drew me towards music from Asia and Africa and albums of Japanese music or especially african drumming and Balinese gamelan were a big influence on my aural taste. 3 SOLAGE - “FUMEUX FUME” performed by the Early Music Consort of London https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba3oy2cD-ok Solage is one of the oddest things on this list but hugely important to me at a technical level. Little is known about him, his entire surviving output doesn’t even add up to an hour and few articles are written about this late 14th century music, which I discovered on the David Munrow set “The Art of Courtly Love” again when I was a teenager. I encountered this field of music because Paul Griffiths writing about the late 20th century generation of Boulez and Stockhausen said that the late 14th century court around Avignon cultivated rhythms so bizarre they made “Le Marteau” look normal. So naturally I had to look that up as I loved the Boulez piece (which could have been a 6th on this list). I read what I could find about these composers, who developed the capacity of notation at the time to use multiple simultaneous metres and divisions of a variable unit, to develop things like the effect of three simultaneous, barely related tempi in Perugia’s “Le Greygnour Bien” or the Stravinskyan syncopations of this rondeau. There’s three bass voices which sometimes are all sung but I like best this version with a solo singer and two medieval instruments in the bass. It has a rhythmic precision and quirkiness of timbre which I think suits the frankly camp aspect of the work. I love the outlandish in music. I have decadent tastes for the extreme which I see in much of the music I love: if it is an example of something it is the most forced or exaggerated one, perhaps because those works can be the most memorable for me. I also have a taste for “camp”, I’m not afraid of the obviously unnatural, the stilted, the grotesque or vulgar and I see “unnecessary” intricacy in music as amusing and interesting as well as an expressive necessity: and, let’s face it, if your “brand” at high school is teacher’s pet slash town freak, being able to sing a stupid song in mediaeval French about smoking hashish from the famously decadent and faintly ridiculous papal court in 14th century Avignon is a good look. 4 NANCARROW: PIANO STUDY No. 37 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFz2lCEkjFk Nancarrow is someone I found out about because of my love of Ligeti and he has become an important example for me of finding technical solutions to compositional questions: he imagined and wanted to hear almost un-notatable rhythms in a polymetrical texture that humans could not fully realise so he turned to mechanical instruments, specifically the player piano. In the same way I have made a similar move towards mechanical performance and digital or virtual realisation of musical works even when there is some “live” or “performed” component. The wit and humour, the air of parody (even self-parody) in his work attracts me as well, there the love of intricate design of the smallest details extends in particular to a special kind of comic timing. Rhythmic precision and a delight in surprise come together: in many ways these are like perfectly executed circus tricks. I also love these kinds of canonic textures in much music: medieval and renaissance music of course is full of them (there are works by Ockeghem et al. that are basically Reich’s “phase” works in nuce), as is Ligeti, Reich, Simeon ten Holt, Andriessen, Webern, Stravinsky, Brahms and of course Bach. Canons are elegant and audible ways to build up complex textures from simple elements. Nancarrow invented several new types of canon, many of which I’ve adapted to use at times in my work and some of the new types of canonic imitation (such as the truncation canon) that I have come up with over the years have themselves been highly influenced by those of Nancarrow. My constant use of prime numbers is because of Nancarrow demonstrating how they lead to almost constant subtle variation if used to form the timing of a polyphonic texture. I also love how clear his pieces are. I personally go for a very sustained, harmonically focused texture in my own “player piano” works done with MIDI files and physical modelling software but Nancarrow is always on my mind and in tribute to him nearly every one of my works features a moment where lines moving at different speeds converge ultimately on something very simple and obvious. It also intrigues me that much of Nancarrow's basic material is banal riffs from boogie-woogie or salon-room "jazz", standard triadic chords, short themes without much character or expression and this is a strategy that allows the canonic textures and play with rhythm to come to the forefront of the work, precisely because the melodic/harmonic aspect is negligible: the final composition is a tightly wound knotting together of divergent forces only held in place by technique and texture. 5 BEETHOVEN: DIABELLI VARIATIONS (performanced by Piotr Anderszewski, one of the few good performances of the piece I know of) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp59KCg_DCY This work is important to me for a simple reason: not only is the “classical tradition” a big part of my history but also because what one learns from Beethoven is a determination to wrest every last drop from the slightest aspects of his material. In a sense Beethoven is the first composer to write a truly “critical” music, which takes almost nothing for granted and certainly is not simply about the stimulation of affect in the listener (although it also does that!). This is a quality rare in any previous music: late Beethoven features many works that criticise themselves, that criticise their contemporaries and which take a somewhat ironic, but also historically informed attitude to musical material. There is a wonderful story of Beethoven in a salon piano recital reducing audience members to tears then laughing at them as if to say how easily manipulated they were made them worthy of contempt. Even if false the story captures something about what an ironic/critical standpoint about composition might be. Beethoven pulverises the material to make it his own, making reference to music of the past, inscribing himself in the tradition of Mozart, Handel, the Bach family and of course Haydn. This is a kind of granular composition: the material is atomised and he composes with the dusty ruins. There’s a kind of comic negativity to these works to which I warmly respond and which I've always connected to those strange late paintings by Picasso that offer variations on famous paintings by Delacroix and Velasquez in a similarly violating spirit.   The genius of this work is that the ridiculous is turned into the sublime by means of scale and technical manipulation. Even in his own time the concept of the “sublime” - the (perhaps necessarily failed?) presentation of the unpresentable - has been applied to much late Beethoven and I think it applies here but it is not free of a kind of immanent critique of the means of its production. Adorno rightly points out how Beethoven develops in his later years a critical attitude to music itself, exemplified well by the entrance of the bass soloist in the 9th symphony who enters saying “oh friends not these sounds”. This is as far as I know one of the first instances of a musical work explicitly commenting on its progress, effectively saying ignore what you’ve heard for the last forty five minutes. Beethoven wrote sets of variations for piano throughout his life. Some, like the variations on various national anthems, are hilariously funny given the distortions they enact on the usually banal and stupid material you find in music designed for nationalistic usage, memorisation and consumption (it’s a nice coincidence therefore that to this day one may buy annual albums of “dance anthems”). This idea of critical composition informs nearly all subsequent music that I admire: Brahms, Mahler, the 2nd Viennese School through to the late 20th Century music of Lachenmann, Nono and later still the “New Complexity” of Richard Barrett, Liza Lim, James Dillon and Brian Ferneyhough. These last three composers are contemporary models for me of the tradition originating in these late Beethoven works. Critical composition is stylistically "innovative" but often cites and distorts historical materials, including the materials deposited by a century of modernism: it is a materialist conception of music, understanding it not as virtually telepathic "spiritual communication" but as a kind of ironic re-enchantment of nature through aesthetic framing, which is to say, musical techniques and notation, both understood in turn as “extendible”. If art is made from nature transformed through technique, art which reflects on this process openly and consciously engages the means of its own production is qualitatively different from art which does not: Beethoven takes material from an other and displays how it can be transformed at the same time as actually transforming it, in real time, before your ears. This has been of tremendous importance to my listening and composition but I'm only now discovering just how deeply marked I am by this idea.