Process and Object

I've been thinking for a few years now about the role of things in my music. By that I mean musical things -- tunes, riffs, chord progressions and so on -- that you're inclined to name and identify and repeat. A lot of the music I like doesn't really have those, which can seem like a form of improverishment but I think it's a question of style rather than "something missing". What follows is a meandering think-piece around this stuff, which I imagine will remain a problem in my music until the last note I play.

Long ago, Cecil Taylor's solo piano music gave me an early clue about how music might sound if it were almost all process. I think the best way to hear it is his long solo piano concerts, a good number of which were recorded. The music is as absurdly dense as Finnegans Wake and can certainly give the impression of chaos (especially with how aggressively Taylor likes to play) but, as with Joyce, close attention is rewarded with a kaleidoscope of motivic development and interconnected ideas:

Taylor's music is, I think, best thought of as a torrential river flowing past, bearing a variety of objects along that give us glimpses of the places the river has flowed through, far upstream. But it's not like a well-made-play with a beginning, middle and end so much as a rambling shaggy-dog story: stream of consciousness rather than hero's journey. You are in the company of a forceful raconteur whose ears have journeyed to the farthest corners and it's best just to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Another example is Evan Parker's solo saxophone music. Parker was attached to the free improvisation scene that continues to thrive at the margins of the London music world; I sought to involve myself with it for a while in the 1990s but it wasn't a good fit for me, although I couldn't tell why at the time. His solo performances were always the same but always a bit different; I saw him do this a good few times in person back in the day:

Again the music flows from one thing to the next without regard for large-scale form -- whats happening right now can be understood in terms of what happened a moment ago but there's nothing structural to "understand" beyond that. Weirdly I think knowing this makes a lot of this music much more accessible.

Funnily enough, much the same idea was abroad at about the same time in classical music, mostly under the name "moment form". It's especially associated with Stockhausen (at least in my mind) although some of his contemporaries worked with it too. Here's one of the most famous moment form pieces, a favourite among percussionists that's been regularly performed ever since it was premiered:

(Aside: I once did an event in a pub where I talked about modernist music and played some excerpts of recordings. Someone got very angry about Kontakte; I guess it surpassed their limit of tolerance. I think they'd been able to parse most of the things I'd shown in terms of film music but couldn't get a handle on this at all. It seems you can't recuperate this one by attaching some extraneous "meaning" to it, which just makes it seem more successful to me.)

The image at the top of this post is from Yayoi Kusama's installation The Obliteration Room, a white room that each visitor is invited to help cover with coloured stickers. The artwork is neither what the artist originally installed nor the end result at the close of the show but rather the process of change in the space and how it's experienced by each person who interacts with it. Maybe that sounds pretentious but Kusama designed it with children in mind -- it turns the white-cube gallery space where "Do Not Touch" is a standing order into a playground where the only thing you can do is touch and modify the art. In contrast to a museum-curatorial approach where the emphasis is on preservation of a thing, works like The Obliteration Room offer a process that only exists while it's happening and ends when the transformation does.

A Google search tells me I've managed to run this blog for fifteen years without using the word "reification", which I think is pretty good going but I guess today is the day we break that streak. When we "reify" something we "thing-ify" it -- we make it into something we can potentially name, identify, repeat, theorize about, package up and sell and so on. Since art and creativity are hard to think about let's do this by way of a simpler analogy.

Being funny in a flowing conversation can be reified by turning what the funny person said into a joke. Notice that "being funny" is a verb while "a joke" is a noun -- the process has become a thing. To do the process, you just have to do it (but you have to be able to do it, have the opportunity, the right setting and so on) -- to reproduce it as a thing you just need to have the thing, to be able to access and present it. If you don't know any jokes you can buy a joke book but it's much harder to buy the process.

Now, a joke can be told well or poorly -- there's skill in it. There's creative and expressive freedom, too, to adapt the joke to your own taste and style (not to mention choosing which joke to tell). My point isn't that thing-comedy is worse than process-comedy. It's a difference of style, and differences of style usually (always?) point to differences of intention. Many professional comedians are great joke-writers and joke-tellers, Steven Wright being perhaps the ultimate example. It's much easier to tell your friends a little bit excised from a Steven Wright routine than from a Stewart Lee one. I think that's because Wright is a toymaker, an inventor of thousands of beautiful little things, whereas Lee is a process guy.

For a long time I've been interested in processes that have the temporal structure of those "happenings" and performances of the 1960s -- something that takes place once and if you missed it, too bad. At the end of Eric Dolphy's final album we hear a much-quoted line spoken: "when you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air, you can never capture it again." It's ironic that this statement of music as process is famous because it appears on a recording issued as an LP (later a CD) -- a thing that you can experience again and again and again. I'm glad I can do that because I think this record is a masterpiece but its reification makes it different from the live concert that produced it, perhaps especially from the point of view of the musicians:

What all this means is that I'm trying to find ways to intentionally compose and organise musical "mechanisms" that help me produce interesting processes without relying on tunes, motifs, grooves, large-scale forms, chords, riffs, basslines or other musical objects. That's been easier to do in the electronic world, where sounds can be continuously transformed and where we can lean into (or bounce off) the widely-recognised and understood tradition of ambient music.

For solo guitar and similar situations the points of reference seem to be more potentially off-putting and self-indulgent. I think one thing I've long been trying to figure out is how to build bridges between my own love for that stuff and listeners without being either self-indulgent, confrontational or trapped in an ivory tower of my own making. That's a large part of the stuff I write about on this blog, although that's perhaps not always been clear (to me or anyone else). I hope to have more concrete things to say about this in future but for now thanks for bearing with my rambling and I hope you enjoyed the music along the way.