Journal of Music, Technology & Education - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2013

Acousmatic music has facilitated some of the most radical extensions of musical materials and methods available to the composer, moving beyond the traditional instrumental paradigm centred on melodic and harmonic forms derived from focal pitch that can be conveniently notated in the abstract form of a score. Two perspectives on the role and perception of pitch in acousmatic music are considered. First, in works of complex textural and spectral construction in which, as an inherently salient dimension of listening, perception of pitch can function as an important element of structural focus and definition. Second, it is viewed from a spectralist approach to sound materials, where components of the partial structure of a physical object’s sound can be made available as individual and timbrally related pitch identities but which retain an organic connection to a source sound. Analytical examples are drawn from widely available works from the acousmatic repertoire. Sound examples (in 44.1kHz 24 bit format) can be found at: https://www.dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/8946

In his book Theory of the Avant-Garde ([1974] 1984) Peter Bürger claims that the technique of ‘collage’ introduced ‘reality fragments’ into paintings. He went on to emphasize the fundamental importance of both ‘collage’ and ‘montage’: ‘A theory of the avant-garde must begin with the concept of montage that is suggested by the early cubist collages’. For Bürger the consequences of using ‘reality fragments’ were profound: the artwork was transformed and, as a result, the ‘organic’ nature of art itself was challenged. In many ‘collages’ the artist ensures that ‘reality fragments’ coexist (uneasily perhaps) with painted, abstract representations of the world. This article explores these topics within the context of teaching a module on the undergraduate Fine Art course at Middlesex University. The teaching is seminar-based in groups of up to fifteen students with a particular emphasis on understanding the relationships between practical work and underlying theoretical assumptions. In order to tease out these relationships I introduce examples from the works of the French composer Pierre Henry who collaborated with Pierre Schaeffer at the very beginnings of musique concrète. Henry’s work is chosen as an example of the tension between the ‘real-world’ sounds and their possible meanings. The split between Henry and Schaeffer was in hindsight inevitable given the former’s insistence on exploiting the significance and intrinsic beauty of ‘real-world’ sounds. By using terminology from Fine Art critiques of the avant-garde I shall demonstrate in this article that many of Henry’s later compositions can be examined by means of formal concepts such as ‘collage’ and ‘montage’ within a pedagogical framework. Problematic terms such as ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ will also form part of this enquiry.

Much of the text in this article first appeared as an invited keynote presentation given at the From Tape to Typedef; Compositional Methods in Electroacoustic Music symposium held at the University of Sheffield, UK, from 30 January to 2 February 2013 and charts a personal compositional journey from the early 1980s to the present day, referencing compositional methodologies and remarking on what has changed (if anything) over a 30-year career composing with technology on fixed media. The relationship between soundscape composition and acousmatic music is examined with reference to a number of projects and pieces of music including Peel, ABZ/A, Gordon Soundscape, scènes, rendez-vous and the Three Cities Project.

The ‘call for papers’ for the conference From Tape to Typedef: Compositional Methods in Electroacoustic Music, held at the University of Sheffield in January 2013, described a number of possible compositional methods, of which the very first was: ‘In some cases, composers rely upon serendipity – sounds are “found”, processing is inherently experimental, and the electroacoustic work emerges gradually, without predetermination or planning’. This article proposes a name for this method, drawing parallels between the author’s methods in musical composition and her ‘window ledge practice’, illustrated with photographs. Questions discussed include: is ‘searching’ a necessary prerequisite for ‘finding’? If sound processing is used less as a compositional process and more as a realm in which the same ‘finding’ process takes place, how does this change the composer’s approach to tools? Are the aesthetic decisions involved in selection (defined as effective rejection) similar to those assumed to act in ‘creation’? Can the compositional process, as well as the sound selection process, be ear-led rather than pre-planned? Is an intuitive, un-formalized practice academically valid? How can knowledge and skills be developed? Can it be taught or only mentored? Discussion is rooted in an account of the author’s own practice and is presented informally in the first person.

Listening to acousmatic music can be oddly like being on holiday. One is temporarily dislocated from one’s normal environment and mysteriously transported to ‘other’ worlds, where (especially in later recollection, for memory is certainly at work here) the normal rules of physics can be transcended: events and locations are superimposed, one can leap instantaneously from place to place and the logic of cause and effect is malleable. This strange domain, this foreign aural land, nevertheless remains sufficiently related to our everyday experience for us to make sense of it and get our bearings: we seem to recognize places and scenes, events and occurrences we have never personally experienced first-hand; we ‘know’ – though we can never entirely know how we know – that these things are ‘true’.

Acousmatic music is thus a hugely rich field of expression, and one as yet relatively unfettered by conventions and rules that dictate how it should be made, delivered and understood (in my view, the rules change, depending on the material involved). But this situation of artistic and material flexibility evidently makes some people very nervous, especially those in academic circles who would like to bring this upstart music to heel through codification. Starting out as an honourable and innocent attempt to describe, to help commit to memory the new soundscape for which no map exists, codification nevertheless has implicit within it the common ‘guide-book’ problem of implying that only those things noted in its pages are deemed worthy of engagement; it becomes, all too easily, a dogmatic statement of value, a rule book for future visits – and, in the case of composition, for future creation. Creating a formalized or systematized language to allow articulation (in prose) of what is being created (in sound) tends towards a situation in which, eventually, only such formulations are conceivable and permitted. It is, therefore, problematic for me that acousmatic music is often characterized as ‘academic’, for – through artistic practice and arguably by its very nature – acousmatic music is actually rather resistant to simplistic analysis, codification and reduction to repeatable compositional formulae.

Acousmatic music presents us with yet another problem, however. The experience of music – all music – sounding in time is both concrete and ephemeral: it exists in the moment, and afterwards relies on memory. In acousmatic music, this problem is compounded for, in place of the codified systems with which we are familiar, it is based on unique sound materials that give rise to unique musical structures. Its very basis is thus, simultaneously and paradoxically, both more concrete (to invoke Schaeffer’s objet sonore) and more fleeting and ephemeral than the established building blocks of stable, repeatable, easily quantifiable measurements of frequency, duration, timbre ….

We are organic beings inhabiting an organic world, a world that is constantly in flux; whatever the speed of our assimilation of technologies that permit our deconstruction of that world into strings of zeroes and ones, our organs of perception and the cerebral machinery we employ to gain an understanding of what we perceive, are also organic. So, whilst concepts, schemata and pre-compositional strategies may contribute to the creative process, the final arbiters of success in our creative endeavours remain our perception and our ability to relate what we hear to what we understand ourselves to be.

Taking a camera – or recording equipment – on holiday enables us to capture the unique, fleeting moment, in an attempt to fix the ephemeral experience of being ‘elsewhere’. For me, composition (and the teaching of composition) is the process of enabling such moments to evolve into larger musical expressions of human experience – a process that seems not only fittingly natural and organic, but also gives us something to celebrate. Like a holiday, life is fleeting enough.

In recent years, electroacoustic theorists have drawn attention to the experiences and interpretations of listeners; well-known examples include the writings of Stéphane Roy, Luke Windsor, Christiane Ten Hoopen and Denis Smalley. During the same period, relatively little has been said about the methods and techniques employed by composers during the creation of their works. This article starts by considering some of the reasons why methods have been overlooked within the existing body of literature. It goes on to discuss the existing software tool developed at the University of Sheffield, and explains how this software documents the process chain and affords an interaction with the compositional process. The software is then contextualized within a proposed research project, which aims to further develop the software tools, and deliver a series of complete compositional traces by a number of composers, offering these for compilation and comparison. It finishes by proposing ways in which compositional methods might be identified and analysed.