unrelated fiddling

(Unrelated to anything in the previous post) I wrote a little piano piece. Very little -- about a minute of repetitive music. It roughly follows pop-song form (AABA) and uses a sort of modal scale (F-G-A-B-C#-D-E) that I've used before and like to fiddle with. This is nothing special, but I suppose there is something to occasionally writing little songs that don't try too hard.

Anyway, picking up from last time, I mentioned that I wanted to do something modular. For whatever reason I started thinking about a hypothetical modular piece as monophonic. (I seem to naturally gravitate to monody, which might seem strange, but whatever.) I was going to write a long melody which I would then divide into segments which I could move about into new contexts; the first part of the piece would be the melody, the second (presumably much longer) part would be the playing around with it. Then I thought, as long as I insist on emulating Medieval music, I might as well go all the way and write my melody as an elaborate counterpoint to a chunk of plainchant. I quite like juxtaposing that ancient, organic approach with the modern, modular approach. Also, it would give the "segments" a context out of which to be taken without muddling with modern harmonic ideas (that would be irrelevant to the piece).

Meanwhile, I have given no further thought to the problem posed in the last post. The drive to create randomly-generated music comes and goes inexplicably, and I guess it's backed off for now.

fiddling

I've been fiddling around with randomly-generated music for the past week or so. Some interesting stuff has come out of it, but it's not accomplishing what I want it to.

Problem: Create music which satisfies both of the following.
1. randomly generated with the appearance of order
2. has a transparent process

Thinking Songs solved that problem quite well, but in that case only the pitch material was randomly generated. Every other aspect of the piece was designed specifically to meet the second criterion above. Also, it's monophonic; as soon as you introduce harmony to the music, the complexity increases exponentially and the transparency is buried.

Meeting the first criterion on its own is much easier than you might expect, which is primarily why I'm so interested in aleatoric music in the first place. It often happens on its own. I'm convinced that John Cage had to go to great lengths of "cheating" to get his Music of Changes to sound as chaotic as it does. And if you throw something like repetition into the algorithm, the appearance of order is unavoidable.

So I've been writing a lot of randomly generated music this past week which sounds composed -- and even sounds good. But there's just not much point if the process isn't transparent. Why go to the trouble of randomly generating things if the end result just sounds like a normal (if somewhat mediocre) piece? As of now I have no idea how to solve the problem without taking the amount of control I did with Thinking Songs.

Also, inexplicably, I've had a strong urge to write modular music, which has done a good deal to complicate the above (as it is a particularly ill-suited approach to the problem). I should just write something to get it out of my system.