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.

It's been a week since my last post, so I'd better put something up here.

Fingerpaint is coming along little by little. I'm not terribly excited about how it's turning out. It's working, and it's turning out as intended -- I'm just not excited about it. Possibly because it's from 3 years ago. My personality is the sort that wants to be thinking about something new; if I've already worked out how it will work, and know it will work, I lose interest. A frustratingly persuasive part of my brain doesn't see the point of writing down something it already knows (or in cleaning a bathroom that was already clean last week). So I force myself to work on it a little each day, but mostly I want to work on other projects.

One thing that I always seem to have going in one form or another is some sort of randomly-generated crap. Now, there are good, serious pieces that I've written using randomly-generated content, but those are not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about pointless John Cage's Music of Changes rip-offs. I don't really understand why, but every few months I feel compelled to make something like that. I think it's just the act of doing something that results in making something, but without using any mental effort. Kind of like what I imagine knitting to be. So I've spent several hours flipping coins this last week. I've never actually finished one of these "pieces" because, like I said, they're pointless. It's the act of doing it that I enjoy, of watching "music" materialize in front of me. There's no reason to finish, because it loses its worth when it's an object on paper taken out of that happening-on-its-own context.

But also, it occasionally creates something beautiful, a tendency which I find strange and intriguing. The more I play with it, the more I think of "order" as being only a matter of perception. I've found some fun ways of playing with that notion, but getting into that would be a long post so I'll save it for later.

Fingerpaint again

As I work on Fingerpaint, I'm realizing a potential problem with the piece as it's currently forming. Hopefully blogging about it will help me sort out possible solutions.

I've mentioned before that I have a strong Inner Steve Reich. By which I mean I want any processes in my music to be transparent and clear to the audience as they're listening. Now, as far as strictly musical processes go, this isn't a problem with Fingerpaint. "Theme" material is stated, then it's pushed around and wiggled with -- couldn't be more straightforward. But, like I said last time, Fingerpaint is extremely programmatic. And it's not really clear what's "going on" without knowing which portions of music correspond to which descriptive headings.

Possible solution number 1: Ignore it. This is what I did two years ago when I started writing it. I didn't consider it a problem then. My philsophy hasn't changed, so what has changed? Maybe my perspective on what's important to the piece. That tells me that I should spend more time refamiliarizing myself with it before I resume writing. Hum.

Possible solution number 2: Each section is repeated exactly. I considered this after finding that solution number 3 doesn't work. But some of the sections are too short for this to work. And I don't like exact repetition as a rule. Because it's repetitious. :P

Possible solution number 3: Textural elements of each section are repeated. Instinctively anticipating my dislike of solution number 2, I skipped right ahead on to this. The "variation" sections use pitch material from the "theme," repeating pitch content (nearly) verbatim but changing just about everything else. And each section so far uses only a portion of the "theme" material. So I figured I could repeat the section using a different portion of "theme" pitch material, keeping the Everything Else that defines that section. I didn't feel the result was clear enough to warrant the extra length it necessitates. And a big problem with solutions 2 and 3 is that they force a classical-esque symmetry on the piece. Part of the fun of Fingerpaint is that it's extremely asymmetrical.

Possible solution number 4: Each section uses the entire pitch material. Typing out solution 3 brought this to mind as another obvious answer. The biggest problem with this is it wouldn't allow the piece to jump around unpredictably. It's methodical, and that's very much not Fingerpaint.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that ignoring the problem is the way to go. Being able to follow along with the program notes just isn't anywhere near as important as maintaining the pacing (or lack thereof). I can't insert reference points; it's just not meant to be organized. And if you're "following along," you'd end up reducing the piece to some corny Mickey Mousing.

I've convinced myself that not only do you not need to follow the program, but it's best if you can't follow the program. (Hey, this blogging thing really works; I finish the post and I have my answer.) Now I need to decide if I leave the headings in at all. Yeah, I do; you might not need to know what's "going on," but I'd like you to at least know which "themes" are which colors.

Fingerpaint mystery

I'm trying to decipher the notes I've made for a piece called "Fingerpaint" which I started in late 2004 or early 2005. At the time I had basically had the piece written in my head; I just needed to work out the details and write it down. That's a fairly labor-intensive process, and I was distracted by a number of other things, so I put it off. Eventually it got to the point where I didn't remember anything that I didn't have down in my notes. And there it sat for two years. Now I'm trying to figure it out so I can finally write the damn thing.

I have 4 things:
1. The finished first movement (I'm very lucky I have this, as I can compare it to the corresponding notes to see what most of my shorthand meant, not to mention see how the piece was going to work.)
2. Four brief passages of music, titled "Blue," "Green," "Yellow" and "Red." These are a sort of set of "themes" - the material off of which all the material in the piece is based.
3. A list of subheadings (the piece is extremely programmatic, and every few measures there is a descriptive note in the score). I'm extremely lucky once again that the piece works that way, as I can use this list to reconstruct almost the entire piece (except for the items which I don't remember/understand, which I'll simply have to re-write fresh.)
4. My memory. Anyone who knows me can guess that this is fairly worthless. What I've written above is most of everything I remember.

Here's the aforementioned list of subheadings:
- blue [this is in a double box - don't really know why]
- b. lines (3-4) ["blue lines" in the score. The numbers in parentheses correspond to the number of measures that section lasts]
- b. print (1) ["blue thumb print" in the score]
- clean f. ["clean fingers" in the score. And that ends movement 1]
- green [in a double box]
- slow, curvy line
- heavy, short line
- mix blue + green [this is in a box]
- blue-green [boxed]
- clean f.
- yellow [double-boxed]
- 3-finger print (?) [I assume the "?" means I didn't know how many measures it would be, but that doesn't make a lot of sense since most sections don't have a parenthetical number.]
- quick line (1-2)
- mix yellow + green [boxed]
- yellow-green [boxed]
- mix yellow-green w/ blue-green [boxed]
- (mixture)
- clean f.
- dab of yellow
- dab of blue
- mix yellow + blue [boxed]
- yellow-blue (not green) [boxed]
- clean f.
- red [double-boxed]
- dab of blue
- mix red and blue [boxed]
- purple [boxed. Presumably the red-blue mixture.]
- clean f.
- a color on each finger
- led to mess [bracketed. I have no idea what this means, whatsoever, but it seems to be crucial.]
- something on the wall
- bit of low w/ pauses [presumably not an actual heading, just a note to self (?)]
- paint the walls

I really like this piece (obviously - otherwise I wouldn't be going to this trouble). It's sort of like a 4-themed "Theme & Variations," except the variations are ridiculously simple, almost the sort of things you could get by remixing a recording of the theme(s). The movement that was written down pushes the "blue" music around the way fingers push fingerpaint around. As I recall, I played with actual finger paint to research this.

[update:] Notably absent from that list of things I have is an original pen-on-paper copy of the finished movement. I write at the piano, on paper, and probably wouldn't throw that paper away at least until I was completely done with the piece. But the only music I have is a finished, printed copy. This leads me to believe that I wasn't exaggerating much when I said I had the piece written in my head. Very unusual for me.