Thinking Songs

I left off saying something about pulling order out of chaos. That's one of the major ideas behind "Thinking Songs," a set of pieces for solo piano "written" in the spring of 2005. I put "written" in scare quotes because they're randomly-generated pieces. What I wrote in 2005 was a sort of algorithm used to create the Thinking Songs, and I've made a few since then and consider it to be a perpetually growing collection.

What these are is hard to explain. I'll start with the "program note" from the score: "These songs are thinking. Each song is the brief life of a mind consisting of melody. It remembers its own thoughts and manipulates them. Occasionally it hears something it didn't already know; those are the loud bits. Whether it remembers or listens, what it remembers or hears, and how it remembers are determined by a simple algorithm and coin flips."

Here's a sample of what the written music looks like. And the performance notes you need to make sense of that score: "Rhythms are left for the most part to the performer's discretion. Each note should have roughly equivalent weight, so that there is no sense of meter-imposed structure. Breath marks represent silences."

So you've essentially got a series of short monophonic (monophonic = one-note-at-a-time) phrases, usually between 1-5 notes long but potentially much longer. Each of these phrases is either stimulus or memory. The stimuli are single, completely random notes, played fortissimo (very loud). The memories are repetitions or modified repetitions of things that have already happened in the piece, played piano (soft) or quieter with the memory being one dynamic (volume) level below the section it's remembering.

The memories can be transposed (played higher or lower) by an interval already present in the song, or they can be inverted (flipped upside down), or both. These are simple operations, easy for the audience to hear what's going on and where things are coming from. But at the same time they give the song the potential to make anything out of a small amount of material, given enough time to fool around with it. The result is that you can listen along as a pseudo-mind combines and manipulates and recombines ideas to create new, original ideas.

The reason rhythms are left out is for clarity. In early drafts I included rhythms (and just about everything else) in the randomly generated content. In that incarnation, I could see the song's thought process as I was making it, and I found it terribly fascinating. But listening to it it just sounded like chaos. So I tweeked and fiddled and adjusted the algorithm until I got something where the audience could have as much fun hearing the thought process as I had writing it down. That is, if you have fun with that sort of thing. It sounds like a cross between Gregorian chant and Simon (both of which I enjoy). But it also sounds like it's thinking.