The Procedure Scale

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These composers were obsessed with sound formation, however one must realise with sound comes imperfections, fluctuations and the unpredictability. Spectralists found these elements and decided to control them, creating forced relationships within sound by, again like serial and chance methods, using high levels of process in order to ensure beautiful yet false representations of sound. Natural relationships never seemed to be permitted within Spectral compositions as they were always perfectly constructed and emphasised dynamically. These composers wanted to display characteristics in sound that seemed beautiful to them, rather than letting sound display itself.

Minimalists

Even the rebellious Minimalists’ alternate route was obsessed with pattern and process crossing the barriers between classical and commercially popular, which Terry Riley himself called ‘music that could be avant-garde and get an audience too.’ The biggest break away of this type of music was its re-embracement of consonance and pulsing rhythmic patterns. No innovation is evident here as consonance is something that has been worshipped since the dawn of music and the reliance on ‘infective’ rhythms had been practiced within the creation of Blues and Jazz as early as the late nineteenth century. The phase shifting process of Reich can be seen as a technological breakthrough that was developed by the speed alteration of tape loops in the studio, however it was again turned into a constructed procedure with the composer always stressing the audibility of his gradually shifting phase relations. It was process that mattered to them, as it gave the music a sense of purpose with Reich even saying in his 1968 essay Music as a Gradual Process that he was interested in perceptible process. He wanted to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.

The revolution was the breaking free of the elite serialist dictatorship and the bringing of an accessible classical aesthetic to the masses. In other words it is an easy introduction to contemporary classical music and can guarantee to fill seats. The reasoning behind the popularity must have something to do with the simplicity, or in other words, the harmonic restrictiveness within this music. It is full of repetitive gradual process and as a result generates a nice, but not a very challenging listen, which in turn makes it relatable to popular music due to its rhythmic consonance.

So what links each of these movements together? They all say that fascination with sound is what drives them, whether it be organic or electronic. These high procedure level musics seem to overshadow the sound with their tightly constructed forms and processes, which are quite audible due to the forced correlation within the rigid organisations. The link, therefore, is the audibility of the composer’s grip on the sound and as a result how much the process infects the music being created.

Low Procedure Levels

How does one distance themselves from high procedure levels? A good place to start is to locate what causes their prominence within the music. Procedures are used to control sound, so the first step is to relinquish control. The question is who or what are you renouncing control to?

Man and Machine

Some composers have relied on machines to control the outcome of their music. This is not to be confused with the use of machines to generate musical material, which would be a high level of procedure. Relying on the sporadic nature of technology’s incapability to cope with an alien specimen is something that can yield unexpected and ever varying results. A perfect example of this would be the composer Yasunao Tone, an original member of the Fluxes group, who would manipulate playback through scratching and adding foreign objects to CDs so the player would emit errors of sounds in playback, which would naturally differ with each playing. Others such as David Dunn rely on the unpredictable forces in nature to guide their music away from personal authority. This is more so the study of natural behaviours found within constructed analog circuits that have been designed to be sporadic and chaotic. Although these machine fiddlings demonstrate the release of control by setting something in motion and letting in loose, the act of construction in the first place demonstrates a preconceived procedural plan; building something for the purpose of enticing chaos. Is it possible to have autonomy without constructing something first? Everything must come from something so it ought to depend on the composer’s level of knowledge of the outcome linked with how much pre-devised process there was in order to hand over the control. These are still chance methods, however the composer is taking the fate of chance away from their own hands and placing it somewhere else; doubling the already sporadic nature of chance.

Performer Collaboration

If not machines then it must be humans who we put our faith in; most specifically the performers, which is done mainly through collaboration. This is an incredibly broad word that is used plentifully in composer’s descriptions about their music, so therefore let us just categorise it as ‘the act of decision making stemming from the interaction of everyone who is taking part in the creation.’ If you are looking to hand over control to others then you must provide them with the freedom to make their own choices. This is most efficiently done through: ambiguous instructions (guidelines who's main objective is to ensure the performer that there is no wrong choice), conventional notation abandonment (graphic notation or text scores), a combination of the two, or perhaps no guidelines at all. Through combining these methods with verbal interaction, thoughts and ideas are much more efficiently planted in the performers minds. In this sense it is much easier for the composer to get their musical ethos across to the others involved in the creation of the piece.

Distancing Methods

The unifying element with these uncontrolled methods is the quest for indeterminacy, and with this comes the perfect opportunity to distance oneself from procedure in music. There are two types of ‘distancing methods’ which I find to be most effective. The first, as mentioned above, deals with conventional notation abandonment, where the performer’s choices become liberated leading to a more improvisatory style. The second is a method where all compositional material devised (prior to actually composing) stems from improvisation itself, so the composer has no control over any elements within