Composing to Empower (STPA version)

Stephen Scott and Eliot Chayt

Steve Scott: Eliot Chayt and I would like to talk about alienation in the context of experimental vocal music. Having studied and performed experimental vocal works by John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, we felt that the canonical works did not live up to our expectations. Although these works ostensibly empower the performer, the role of the performer was in fact highly circumscribed. The performers had only limited agency, and were denied the opportunity to engage in a debate at the level of aesthetic, structure, and the overall sonic outcome. We will use Habermas’s theory of communicative action (Habermas 1984,1987) as a model to account for why we experienced the symptoms of alienation during our performances.

Eliot Chayt: The alienation we felt motivated us to explore a new avenue of true collective composition, culminating in the collectively composed Hocket Science. This is where we first blurred the line between creator and performer. Instead of composing as individuals, we decided to work together to create an anonymous score. Our compositional egos were not present in the final performance. Instead of our tastes competing with each other, we decided to work together to create anonymous score. Our contributions were mediated through discussion, and emerged as an aesthetically unified set of rules that fit on a single page.

SS: For the past two years, the compositions performed by New Music New College have exhibited aesthetic continuity. We performed many experimental works by Cornelius Cardew, Pauline Oliveros, and John Cage that were designed to empower the performers. To put it another way, these composers attempted to prevent alienation between the composer and performer.

What is alienation in music? As performers, alienation was not a theoretical construct: it was an emotional and psychological experience of unease. We felt that we were somehow expected to contribute to the overall composition, but either the rules were too rigid to allow meaningful expression, or the rules were so lax that it seemed as if our contributions were irrelevant to the outcome of the piece.

	Suggested photo No. 1: NMNC performs Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning, Paragraph 7 (two possible photos)

 

 

 

Some performers felt such a strong sense of unease that they lashed out against the musical system through what I call deviant behavior. These rogue performers would violate the norms of self-control, revealing the limit of the performer’s agency. These acts of deviance are easily observable indicators of an underlying frustration. They made explicit and undeniable the conflict between the performer’s desire to contribute to the creative process and the limitations imposed by the composer’s score.

Habermas’s theory of communicative action helps us to account for the performer’s feelings of alienation. He wrote his theory as a critique of modernity, but it seems that the theory could be applied as a critique of modern music. When I say modern music, I mean the Adornian aesthetic of a professional composer fulfilling his individual creative urges while making no concessions to the audience or performers.

Communicative action takes place when two individuals linguistically understand each other and attempt to form consensus between their different viewpoints. When consensus is reached, it is holistic, not contradicted by the communicator’s prior empirical observations, social norms, or subjective viewpoint. To achieve consensus, two communicators must be able to challenge each other’s claims. Obversely, a communicator’s opinions must be acknowledged when they are made. For communicative action to take place, one must be able to criticize, and that criticism must be responded to, or reciprocated, with further explanation or agreement (Habermas 1984:86).

Strategic action is a coercive type of communication and can be considered the opposite of communicative action. Unlike communicative action, which strives for mutual understanding and consensus, strategic action is used to impose one actor’s view upon the listener. Because strategic actions disrupt the society’s ability to be reflexive and rational, it results in social pathologies, such as the loss of meaning, anomie, and psychological disorders. Alienation occurs when communicative action succumbs to coercive or strategic action (Habermas 1984:85-86).

In the canonical works, either the performers could not accept or reject the aesthetic claims made by the composer, or their validity claims could not be responded to in a meaningful way. My own unease, and the observed social deviance by rogue performers, indicated that the canonical pieces were fundamentally coercive and alienating.

EC: For Cardew and Cage, the agency of a particular performer gives a certain unpredictability to a performance. The performer is exploited one way or another: either he is confined by strict rules as in Cardew’s The Great Learning, or he is treated as a random chance element, as in many of Cage’s works. Many begrudgingly settled into their role as an automaton following a score. Or they found a way to skew the spotlight toward themselves. As the dialog of communication broke down, some performers and audience members defied the norms of the piece. Either way, everyone could perceive the breakdown in communication. The performer could neither confirm nor contest the aesthetic claims of the composer.

SS: Having experienced social discomfort in the earlier performances, we wanted to avoid such uncomfortable situations in our future compositions. As students in Stephen Miles’s course, Experimental Music in Theory and Practice, we attempted to create a piece collectively that avoided alienating the performers. Out of our initial discussions, the concept of “mediation” emerged as a useful idea base upon which to base our work. Using the concept of mediation as the idea that would guide us, we began to compose what we would later call Hocket Science.

For our initial attempts in the late fall of 2003, we approached the project as ten individual composers. This attempt did not yield the best results. In our haste to complete the project, we became fixated upon the musical product. Our group dynamic broke down as we composed individually outside of class. We reverted to our experience as composers, and our main concerns revolved around the sonic outcome. Those who composed in a top-down fashion thought in terms like transitions, harmony, rhythm, texture, and density. Others composed in a bottom-up fashion. I was one such composer. I tried to create a musical scenario that created musically interesting events using a few rules. Still, whether top-down or bottom up, we were still fixated on the sonic outcome, at the expense of the social dynamic. Although we had promised that we would strive to empower performers, we were still treating performers like pawns in our musical game, vessels for our individual artistic visions. Mediation occurred, but on a sonic level, not on the social level.

Before those individual pieces left the drawing board, we ran into compositional difficulty. Each composition was an expression of individual taste. It was hopeless to wrangle with each other over the appropriateness of the various techniques, for there was no obvious right answer. For a few weeks we thought we could somehow synthesize our projects, taking interesting features from them to be reassembled into a musical amalgam. That strategy went nowhere. The result seemed not synthesized, but cannibalized. We quickly realized that an amalgamated composition would be aesthetically incoherent. Each individual composition had a logic of its own; we would lose something if we were to divorce the pieces from their original context. More importantly, we realized that an amalgamated composition would inevitably be hierarchical. One person’s idea would come to dominate the aesthetic vision, and the other contributions would be mere appendages to the winning idea.

In February, we started over, albeit as the smaller compositional collective, XMG (eXperimental Music Group). We abandoned all talk of musical processes and returned to the guiding vision: what is mediation? We still had no idea what the word exactly meant, even without discussing how we would realize it in the score. It was grueling to discuss the nature of mediation without being able to discuss the musical outcome. What we were doing, however, was developing a common aesthetic. We had underestimated both the difficulty and the necessity of developing a general, overarching aesthetic vision. We slowly realized what we wanted the performers to feel and experience on a general level, before we fully knew the specifics of what we wanted them to do, or what the result would sound like. We reframed mediation as a social process occurring between the musical desires of the performers. If the performers were forming a musical consensus, brought together by the intermediary constitution governing the piece, the performers would feel as if they were part of a dialog, like they were a part of the creative process. They would also feel that the outcome of the piece emerged not from the protocol, but from their own actions. We expected the performers to use the protocol as an impartial tool to bring creative visions together, not as a source of aesthetic authority.

Eventually, we found ourselves near the end of the compositional process, and discussion of previously ignored musical details came back to haunt us. What was this going sound like? Finally, the answer hit us. The fundamental problem with our approach was that we had to let go of trying to control the sonic outcome. We became aware of the inherent conflict between the composer’s wish to ensure a reliably successful performance, and the performer’s aspiration to act creatively. No performer who is performing a piece that claims to empower him or her should be forced to jump through the hoops imposed by the composer’s particular taste. This is especially true if the composers themselves could not reach consensus on the best course of action. To prevent alienation and to wrap-up the compositional process, we ceded responsibility for all underdetermined musical decisions to the performers. Stephen Miles froze the compositional process and drafted the rules we had sketched so far. I think all of us were nervous that we were trusting amateurs to make compositional choices. But yet, some how, the rules were sufficient. They worked extremely well, better than we had ever imagined. We named this musical protocol we had drafted Hocket Science.

     EC: Hocket Science is a generalized protocol that is compatible with a wide range of musical tastes and stylistic requirements. More specifically, it is a three-movement composition based on the concept of “mediation.” It is a process that involves individual creative input, dialectical and group mediation, and consensus formation through musical debate.

Suggested photo No. 2: NMNC performs Hocket Science, Movement 1: Dissolution (two photos – use both?)

 

 

 

     The first movement, “Dissolution,” begins with two different groups of performers assembled in two separate rooms, each group holding hands in a circle, facing outward. Both groups go through the same process throughout. Each group begins singing a well-known short song in unison, the two groups singing different songs. Each performer in the circle is instructed to gradually reduce the melody to a short fragment of two or three notes, and this fragmentation is achieved through the use of hocket technique. A hocket occurs when a single melody line is passed between different singers. Rather than sing the whole melody, each performer chooses individually what parts to sing, narrowing down from the whole as they step out from the circle and break with their neighbors. The hocket process is extreme, to such an extent that the original melody is atomized into small fragments.

     Once the melody becomes fragmented through the hocket process, each performer begins to vary his two- to five-note fragment. As the performers continue walking while singing their melodic fragment, their turn in the hocket comes around and they slightly alter their fragment. They alter pitch and scale, and generally change intonation to fit their individual tastes.

Suggested photo No. 3: NMNC performs Hocket Science, Movement 2: Mediation (two photos – use both?)

 

 

 

     For the second movement, “Mediation,” both groups meet in a central room, where each performer sits across from a pre-assigned counterpart from the other group. Here the two performers attempt to combine their two individualized fragments by finding mutually agreeable pitches, registers, texts, and embellishments. Every pair does it a little differently. The catch is that the performers are not allowed to communicate with spoken words, only by singing their fragments and by responding with alterations of their own which confirm or deny suggestions from their counterpart. In this way, this “face-off” portion of Hocket Science most exemplifies Habermasian communication.

	Suggested photo No. 4: NMNC performs Hocket Science, Movement 3:Recombination (three photos – use all?)

 

 

     In the final movement, “Recombination,” the original groups reconvene to assemble their fragments into a larger sequence, resembling a melody like the original. However, their fragments are now alien to the rest of the group. Both
groups have the same components, but each group reassembles them independently. If the harmonic content of the seed melodies is compatible, and if there is a good balance between cadences and connective melody
fragments, the result can be quite harmonious—or not.

SS: Instead of writing music individually, we found that writing music collectively ensures that no single individual’s artistic vision is imposed upon the performers. The final score was generalizable; it was less a description of an envisioned sonic outcome, but more a framework for creative decision- making. By replacing the prescriptive rules with what we describe as a musical protocol, or constitution, we succeeded in preventing the alienation of the performer. Performers told us that they felt genuine creative control, and that they felt empowered. We believe that such a generalized protocol would not have been possible if the composition had not been collaborative. Writing in a group, we suppressed our individual creative egos, yielding creative responsibility to the performers.

EC: My experience as a performer was that I had to push myself to follow the rules. It gave me creative license, within reasonable limits. I did not feel stressed by too many compositional parameters. Neither did I feel free to run amok. The aural experience of the piece was a success, and the experience of hearing my colleagues faced with the same challenges made me feel like I was participating in a larger a group endeavor. In the mediation stages, I felt my colleagues were more than willing to surpass their normal skill level for the benefit of the piece, and more often than not, they succeeded. I thought it was a real experimental piece, in that people were not simply going through the motions—they had a real zeal to experiment in their performance.

SS: As a performer, I felt that I had full control over the aesthetic. We were able to develop a musical score that allowed performers to challenge the musical outcome of the piece on a deep level, the level where style and aesthetic exist. I could sing in whatever style I wanted, be it Opera, Rock, Jazz, or Japanese. We could mix and match our melodies any way we wanted. Others could criticize our contributions, which taught me good and bad ways to communicate with others, and I learned the limitations of the melodies that I was creating. I think the most rewarding part of the composition was when you can hear your contributions in the final outcome. You hear the piece, and say to yourself “wow, that is my line I am hearing, right at the beginning of the piece where we all decided it should be put”. We were empowered, because the entire piece was composed by the performers.

As a composer, however, a part of me felt alienated from the final outcome. I felt that I had relinquished my right to express myself, and gave it to the performers instead. As a performer, I felt like a composer, making compositional choices. But for those of us who had designed the protocol, we felt less like composers and more like software programmer. We had created the technology that enabled others to express themselves, but the technology was stylistically neutral. It was strange how, in the end, I identified more with my role as a performer, who had ultimate compositional responsibility, than with the composers, who had suppressed their aesthetic opinions so others could express theirs. On the other hand, the piece points the way to an anonymous aesthetic, in the sense that the creator is less important than, and at the service of, the musical conversation. While the new medium may not be as glamorous as the traditional hero-role composers are accustomed to, the reward is found in seeing the performers actively involved in the creative process.

EC: Because it is hard to reach consensus on a musical process, one of two things can happen in a collaborative composition: One tendency is for an individual to impose his or her vision upon the group, defeating the purpose of group composition, and ending the communicative process. The other tendency is to under-compose. Sometimes this least-common-denominator style may result in elegantly simple rules. Other times, it may result in missed compositional opportunities. In navigating between the Scylla of authoritarianism and the Charybdis of populism, we had strayed too close to the former. By granting autonomy to the performers, we experienced the best of both worlds: no one style dominated over the performers, yet it was still musically complex.

SS: In the end, we do ourselves a disservice to underestimate the ability of individuals to think for themselves. In Hocket Science, granting the performers autonomy made the piece simpler to compose and to perform, and allowed the performers a central role in realizing their own aesthetic vision. The absence of deviant behavior in Hocket Science demonstrates the extent to which individuals felt included in the compositional process. If built-upon, Hocket Science and other protocol-based compositions could fulfill the long-sought promise of a democratic musical aesthetic.

References

Habermas, Jürgen

1984 The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One: Reason and Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, Jürgen

1987 The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.