Dedicated to the memory of unforgettable
Olivier Messiaen
and
Iannis Xenakis
Olivier Messiaen
and
Iannis Xenakis
- PREFACE – CHRONICLES, LOOKING BACK
In 1968, I was heading to the end of my first modern period (1962-1970) marked by influence of Polish avant-garde school from app. 1956-1965 (it were the Sturm und Drang days for Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Kazimierz Serocki, Bogusław Schäffer, mature but questing for novelty Witold Lutosławski, and others) and especially the idea of the sonoristic epoch of music history that is coming to fully eliminate the remnants of tonal-homophone era. That idea has been proclaimed by musicologist Tadeusz Zieliński in his article that appeared in October 1963 in the Polish magazine Ruch muzyczny. His prophesies about pitch factor descending now from its supreme role in the music paradigm into secondary and inactive one seemed to have some reason when one turns to the music reality of the time.
After exploring some elements of 12-tone technique, limited aleatory of rhythm with space notation, free, on the run made mixture of modal, tonal and atonal “molecules” forming some sonic points, agglomerates and clouds, and experimenting with unusual instrumental sets and new extraordinary playing techniques, I step by step began to sense that I still have an insufficient base for a personal manner which wants and tends to be the fundamental one allowing me to produce a serious and long-lasing output. It became clear to me that the distilled timbre category only as such (if based mostly on non-pitched sounds) may produce pretty limited array of music idioms and textures – not unlike to the visual art where absolute color patch technique isolated from drawing contours might lead – and sometimes really led – to over-simplification, over-flattening, often – to the depletion of minuscule sensible moments and delicate nuances. The drawing, the line, the contour shall be re-established in music composition, and the new syntax introduced that might substitute anscient worked-out system of tonal tensions and resolutions, I thought. After all, all the most prominent individual styles in 20. century literature, from Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Franz Kafka to Hermann Broch, Hermann Hesse, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Luiz Borjes and Umberto Eco (to name the few) as their inalienable attributes have the enormously rich, broadly varied vocabulary, morphology and intricate, often unic syntax. So I must elaborate and develop my very own system of vocabulary and grammar, I pondered.
It doesnʹt mean that the notion of timbre becomes insignificant – it just takes its function in interaction with other music parameters, and only sometimes, in moments of climaxes which were classified by Russian movie director Sergey Eisenstein as “an exit beyond” in his theory of pathetic and un-pathetic art, the timbre in its appearance stripped of determined pitch category may accent some special, decisive moments in the unfolding of a composition. One might grasp this process as analogous to usage of simple phonemes = sonores stripped of the meaning that have normal codified words = pitches and their groups. The great Ukrainian-Russian poet Velimir-Viktor Khlebnikov shall be mentioned there as a most remarkable example of literary style possessing unimaginable super-vocabulary and super-syntax that includes the pure phonemes in their pra-historic, pra-cultural, almost purely biological essence – as one within a dozen of his sub-styles, including the traditional rhymed and metered ones sub-forms and sub-genres constituting the impressive whole.
There is a frapping similarity of Velimir Khlebnikov as a poet and Karlheinz Stockhausen as a composer – in their pursuit to incorporate into their world the whole Universe of sub-worlds, sounds, constellations, vocabularies, grammars, sub-stiles, meanings and connotations. Both became for me the inspiration for creating my own composition system.
But where and how to start from?
Approximately at that time, in 1968-69, I red the iconic text by Olivier Messiaen “Technique of mon language musical” just published in Polish translation. Few strips of his music were heard before and sheet music of his “Mode de valeurs et intensités” got once to my hands. – Very many colleagues around began to feel that in-changeable usage of 12-tone system in its rigorous form, practiced by serialists, may lead to monotony as all 12 shall be used in absolutely equal proportion thus limiting, if not preventing at all, the necessary changes and variety of pitch organization. And all-interval series epidemic, although it vanished shortly, at a moment menaced to aggravate the music situation even more.
So I realized that the modal base might be a remedium, a “refreshment” of that imminent drab and monotony. And the “Mantra” by Stockhausen, which just has been recorded, with its modal opening phrase, even embellished by a gruppetto (!), managed to reinforce my conviction.
Another else stimulus came again from Poland – in an annual periodical named Res facta, I found an article by Xenakis on his theory and practice of sieves. Putting apart all his mathematical formulas and tables, over-complex for everybody not versed in high mathematics, I got the simple conclusion – the modal principle must rule my music from now on.
So, because I didnʹt understand in full the sieve theory at that time, I decided to build my own collection of modes – and started from tables of harp tuning for specific glissandos to be incorporated in my melodrama “La Mer” I was composing at that time. I began using step by step deduction, applying subsequently flats, naturals and sharps to each harp string – from A to G. As an outcome, I obtained several hundreds harp tunings a.c.a. modes. Then I had to eliminate all those with enharmonic unisons like G-sharp and A-flat. After completing that “cleaning”, I saw there were 365 modes remained. In the next step, I transposed them in successively ascending octaves from A0 to B7 and descending back, then appended together all these modes to 7-chains, this way obtaining long rows going up and down across the piano keyboard scope. As a result, there are 104 single (only ascending OR descending) – or 52 double (ascending-descending) such chains. These chained rows-modes-scales became my primary pitch material since 1968-69 and remain in that role to this day. Primary – but not only, for I added later on some other pitch sets that complemented and essentially broadened this initial source.
At this moment, I had no clear vision of the way I have to work in the rhythm domain. When looking at some landmark scores of the 1950-s, like “Le marteau sans maître” by Pierre Boulez or First String Quartet by Elliott Carter, I has been astonished by phenomenal richness, versatility and grace just of their rhythm web. But I had in my hands then no source so badly needed for deciphering the arcane principles of rhythm technique of these 20. century classics – the Iron Curtain and its mighty grip on everybodyʹs neck dispelled any hopes for getting to such sources, for traveling abroad was virtually excluded from customs of Soviet way of life. So my fate, like that of all colleagues in USSR, was to go my own solitary way in developing the personal rhythm vocabulary.
The very first composition based on those 52 (104) chained rows-modes-scales was Homoeomorphy I for piano. The idea of design has been born when listening to piano “Etude per 8 doigts” by Claude Debussy. I envisioned a huge form built from fragments of my rows-modes-scales with the measuring base – 1/16, meter 32/16 at the velocissimo possibile quasi glissando speed, intersected by rest zones. No contrasting element, but at the same time – no repetitions, following the known statement of Arnold Schoenberg. Any scale fragment, their sequence and any rest zone must have different length. Over this web of passages are superimposed
zones of dynamic levels – pp, mf, ff, sharply changing but without any cresc.-decresc., and
zones of depressed – released pedal, –
all of them also of various and unequal length fluctuating in broad scope.
Next question: how should be determined the lengths of so innumerable fragments?
In the same issue of Polish quarterly Res facta, where I found Xenakis article on sieves, there was also a text (I cannot remember the authorʹs name) on applying random numbers in visual arts, especially in commerce and business, and on the notion of mapping so widely known these days to any American in academy domain dealing with arts. There was short remark on philosophic-aesthetic foundation of the probability, non-binary logic and other related topics. And I instantly felt – that method is to be mine, in spite that at that time, there was no available computer or another generator of random numbers and I had the only tool on hand – the 52 playing card set. So I started to shuffle them and pull out one at a time – by chance.
But from the very beginning, I didnʹt give up everything to the chance beyond limits. The whole form was constructed as a sequence of bigger zones – one contained only up-down segments of 2-7 notes length, another did 8-15 notes etc. Even the sequence of such bigger zones was not linear – from shortest to longer and up to the longest. Just the opposite, there was intently created a zigzag-like configuration. Their length was determined by random numbers counting from several dozens to hundreds of 16th notes.
In contrast to tendencies of other zones, the zones of loudness levels tended to break into more and more short fragments toward the medium of the piece and increase their lengths thereafter.
What was more tangible in sense that it might be apprehended as a little distorted linearity of the form process – thatʹs the increasing (again non-linearly) length of rest zones, up to several minutes toward the end of Homoeomorphy I. Thus, it is not unthinkable that during these long rests, a listener might subconsciously unfold in his imagination another zone – of imaginary scales, scales-hosts that are sounding in their brains, added to the real ones as one else sound color of sorts.
That manifold composing technique taking for initial element only the ascending and descending scalar movement divided into differently “colored” segments counting up to 3 (dynamic levels) *2 (pedal-no pedal)=6 plus 2 types of rest zones (silent – with the resonant vestiges of previous sounding zone) – in total it sums up to 8 such colors – that technique allowed to create seemingly uniform composition which is characteristic by maximum of the possible inner variability and multi-(pseudo?)-colorfullness, within the basically flat undistorted sound of contemporary piano.
After exploring some elements of 12-tone technique, limited aleatory of rhythm with space notation, free, on the run made mixture of modal, tonal and atonal “molecules” forming some sonic points, agglomerates and clouds, and experimenting with unusual instrumental sets and new extraordinary playing techniques, I step by step began to sense that I still have an insufficient base for a personal manner which wants and tends to be the fundamental one allowing me to produce a serious and long-lasing output. It became clear to me that the distilled timbre category only as such (if based mostly on non-pitched sounds) may produce pretty limited array of music idioms and textures – not unlike to the visual art where absolute color patch technique isolated from drawing contours might lead – and sometimes really led – to over-simplification, over-flattening, often – to the depletion of minuscule sensible moments and delicate nuances. The drawing, the line, the contour shall be re-established in music composition, and the new syntax introduced that might substitute anscient worked-out system of tonal tensions and resolutions, I thought. After all, all the most prominent individual styles in 20. century literature, from Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Franz Kafka to Hermann Broch, Hermann Hesse, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Luiz Borjes and Umberto Eco (to name the few) as their inalienable attributes have the enormously rich, broadly varied vocabulary, morphology and intricate, often unic syntax. So I must elaborate and develop my very own system of vocabulary and grammar, I pondered.
It doesnʹt mean that the notion of timbre becomes insignificant – it just takes its function in interaction with other music parameters, and only sometimes, in moments of climaxes which were classified by Russian movie director Sergey Eisenstein as “an exit beyond” in his theory of pathetic and un-pathetic art, the timbre in its appearance stripped of determined pitch category may accent some special, decisive moments in the unfolding of a composition. One might grasp this process as analogous to usage of simple phonemes = sonores stripped of the meaning that have normal codified words = pitches and their groups. The great Ukrainian-Russian poet Velimir-Viktor Khlebnikov shall be mentioned there as a most remarkable example of literary style possessing unimaginable super-vocabulary and super-syntax that includes the pure phonemes in their pra-historic, pra-cultural, almost purely biological essence – as one within a dozen of his sub-styles, including the traditional rhymed and metered ones sub-forms and sub-genres constituting the impressive whole.
There is a frapping similarity of Velimir Khlebnikov as a poet and Karlheinz Stockhausen as a composer – in their pursuit to incorporate into their world the whole Universe of sub-worlds, sounds, constellations, vocabularies, grammars, sub-stiles, meanings and connotations. Both became for me the inspiration for creating my own composition system.
But where and how to start from?
Approximately at that time, in 1968-69, I red the iconic text by Olivier Messiaen “Technique of mon language musical” just published in Polish translation. Few strips of his music were heard before and sheet music of his “Mode de valeurs et intensités” got once to my hands. – Very many colleagues around began to feel that in-changeable usage of 12-tone system in its rigorous form, practiced by serialists, may lead to monotony as all 12 shall be used in absolutely equal proportion thus limiting, if not preventing at all, the necessary changes and variety of pitch organization. And all-interval series epidemic, although it vanished shortly, at a moment menaced to aggravate the music situation even more.
So I realized that the modal base might be a remedium, a “refreshment” of that imminent drab and monotony. And the “Mantra” by Stockhausen, which just has been recorded, with its modal opening phrase, even embellished by a gruppetto (!), managed to reinforce my conviction.
Another else stimulus came again from Poland – in an annual periodical named Res facta, I found an article by Xenakis on his theory and practice of sieves. Putting apart all his mathematical formulas and tables, over-complex for everybody not versed in high mathematics, I got the simple conclusion – the modal principle must rule my music from now on.
So, because I didnʹt understand in full the sieve theory at that time, I decided to build my own collection of modes – and started from tables of harp tuning for specific glissandos to be incorporated in my melodrama “La Mer” I was composing at that time. I began using step by step deduction, applying subsequently flats, naturals and sharps to each harp string – from A to G. As an outcome, I obtained several hundreds harp tunings a.c.a. modes. Then I had to eliminate all those with enharmonic unisons like G-sharp and A-flat. After completing that “cleaning”, I saw there were 365 modes remained. In the next step, I transposed them in successively ascending octaves from A0 to B7 and descending back, then appended together all these modes to 7-chains, this way obtaining long rows going up and down across the piano keyboard scope. As a result, there are 104 single (only ascending OR descending) – or 52 double (ascending-descending) such chains. These chained rows-modes-scales became my primary pitch material since 1968-69 and remain in that role to this day. Primary – but not only, for I added later on some other pitch sets that complemented and essentially broadened this initial source.
At this moment, I had no clear vision of the way I have to work in the rhythm domain. When looking at some landmark scores of the 1950-s, like “Le marteau sans maître” by Pierre Boulez or First String Quartet by Elliott Carter, I has been astonished by phenomenal richness, versatility and grace just of their rhythm web. But I had in my hands then no source so badly needed for deciphering the arcane principles of rhythm technique of these 20. century classics – the Iron Curtain and its mighty grip on everybodyʹs neck dispelled any hopes for getting to such sources, for traveling abroad was virtually excluded from customs of Soviet way of life. So my fate, like that of all colleagues in USSR, was to go my own solitary way in developing the personal rhythm vocabulary.
The very first composition based on those 52 (104) chained rows-modes-scales was Homoeomorphy I for piano. The idea of design has been born when listening to piano “Etude per 8 doigts” by Claude Debussy. I envisioned a huge form built from fragments of my rows-modes-scales with the measuring base – 1/16, meter 32/16 at the velocissimo possibile quasi glissando speed, intersected by rest zones. No contrasting element, but at the same time – no repetitions, following the known statement of Arnold Schoenberg. Any scale fragment, their sequence and any rest zone must have different length. Over this web of passages are superimposed
zones of dynamic levels – pp, mf, ff, sharply changing but without any cresc.-decresc., and
zones of depressed – released pedal, –
all of them also of various and unequal length fluctuating in broad scope.
Next question: how should be determined the lengths of so innumerable fragments?
In the same issue of Polish quarterly Res facta, where I found Xenakis article on sieves, there was also a text (I cannot remember the authorʹs name) on applying random numbers in visual arts, especially in commerce and business, and on the notion of mapping so widely known these days to any American in academy domain dealing with arts. There was short remark on philosophic-aesthetic foundation of the probability, non-binary logic and other related topics. And I instantly felt – that method is to be mine, in spite that at that time, there was no available computer or another generator of random numbers and I had the only tool on hand – the 52 playing card set. So I started to shuffle them and pull out one at a time – by chance.
But from the very beginning, I didnʹt give up everything to the chance beyond limits. The whole form was constructed as a sequence of bigger zones – one contained only up-down segments of 2-7 notes length, another did 8-15 notes etc. Even the sequence of such bigger zones was not linear – from shortest to longer and up to the longest. Just the opposite, there was intently created a zigzag-like configuration. Their length was determined by random numbers counting from several dozens to hundreds of 16th notes.
In contrast to tendencies of other zones, the zones of loudness levels tended to break into more and more short fragments toward the medium of the piece and increase their lengths thereafter.
What was more tangible in sense that it might be apprehended as a little distorted linearity of the form process – thatʹs the increasing (again non-linearly) length of rest zones, up to several minutes toward the end of Homoeomorphy I. Thus, it is not unthinkable that during these long rests, a listener might subconsciously unfold in his imagination another zone – of imaginary scales, scales-hosts that are sounding in their brains, added to the real ones as one else sound color of sorts.
That manifold composing technique taking for initial element only the ascending and descending scalar movement divided into differently “colored” segments counting up to 3 (dynamic levels) *2 (pedal-no pedal)=6 plus 2 types of rest zones (silent – with the resonant vestiges of previous sounding zone) – in total it sums up to 8 such colors – that technique allowed to create seemingly uniform composition which is characteristic by maximum of the possible inner variability and multi-(pseudo?)-colorfullness, within the basically flat undistorted sound of contemporary piano.
