What Art Can You Make With an Empty Container
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In 1952, John Muzzle premiered a controversial piece of music called 4'33″. Anyone that has studied music or art may know it equally the Silence slice. Simply a deeper understanding of information technology exposes the thought that silence is hard if not impossible to find in the world. And that music is everywhere if we just choose to listen. For those unfamiliar with the work yous'll find much has been written about it. A good summary of the premiere can exist found here.
I consider Cage'southward piece to exist i of the most influential of the 20th Century. And what makes it and then astounding is that to feel it, you just need to imagine information technology. You never have to hear a recording or go to a concert. I can think of no other work that has accomplished this feat.
Some other Cagean idea was that of musical grade conceived as an empty container, where abstruse schemes based on duration, rather than harmony, were used to define the construction. In a commercial context, consider the omnipresent AABA form. Y'all tin can hear it in the abstruse, you lot tin become a sense of its temporality, you can imagine the return to A afterwards B, and all this without e'er considering content. Without form you don't accept fine art and Cage proved that content is already all around us.
Every bit composers or listeners we are naturally attracted to content; melody, harmony, texture, timbre, rhythm, abstract sonic events, etc. We perceive these things as firsthand, every bit they occur. But it is course that makes a slice of music whole and gives information technology an identity. The interplay betwixt the satisfaction of pre-established expectations and the unexpected variation or undermining of those expectations can contribute to a successful and engaging musical work. Fifty-fifty some of the most adventurous composers of new music in the 20th Century adhered to existing musical forms.
Simply at that place are other ways to think well-nigh it. There accept been some experimentations or major departures when it comes to musical form in western music. A couple worth noting:
Karlheinz Stockhausen amid others explored a concept known as moment form, in which every "moment" tin be considered a self-contained unit and unconnected to the next, but for their temporal adjacency.
The minimalists like Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass explored formal ideas with slowly evolving structures and extreme repetition.
Visual artist Chuck Close, writes that Philip Drinking glass, "…was just investigating the process. My real connectedness to music was also based on process… The activity of making art was the art. The structure wasn't an empty container that you fill with content. The container was the content… We were trying to plummet the idea of class and content into i perception." (read more hither)
Popular musical form has been using a variation of AABA with the occasional C department and a Span for years. Like pop music, many classical and contemporary musical forms rely on a very elementary approach. The exposition of an idea, the evolution or variation of that thought, the introduction of a different thought, and the return to the original thought. These structures and so reappear often separated by a third idea. The underlying concept hither is listener manipulation. You prepare expectations, you satisfy those expectations, you set them up again, only merely partially reconcile the listener's internal prediction. Or you offering some completely new idea instead. You withhold what you know the listener expects and release information technology in some big musical payoff. The artistry or craft comes in balancing anticipation and satisfaction in an engaging temporal space, while avoiding overly anticipated outcomes that lead to boredom. It should exist too noted, that completely unpredictable material also risks disintegrating listener engagement.
Why this arroyo works must take something to practice with human nature. Virtually people enjoy the occasional or the unexpected, but rely on the familiar to make sense of the world. Peradventure music is no dissimilar.
I make no judgements about any music, and tin can appreciate the craft of pop song-writing as much every bit music created in a costless jazz context, dissonance, field recordings or a good Mariachi band. Experimental music to me is about exploration and discovery. I give myself the license to use everything effectually me in terms of found sounds and instruments, aptitude circuits, software, hardware or anything that can generate a audio wave. As an experimentalist, content has always been easy to generate. I honey sounds of all kinds and it's usually more difficult for me to discard material than it is to generate or record it.
So I offering this commodity as a self-reflection more than anything else. For me, course is the problem and the solution becomes the musical work. Oft I discover myself unconcerned with specifics of harmony, melody or meter; iii devices that are typically interrelated with course. And then without content dictating formal ideas, I'm confronted with Cage'due south concept of course as an "empty container." Simply put, structural durations of time to exist filled with sonic content. In 2001, I released a CD called Equal Form. I was experimenting with the idea of juxtaposing sections of music generally unrelated, with the exception that they were all the exact same length (normally around a infinitesimal). I was operating on the premise that each listener would perceive their own sense of time, then that each section would not necessarily seem the same length. Instead, they would compose their ain form based on their appointment with the content in any given department. Since then I have loosened my approach and become more intuitive in defining form.
In that location is a story about Muzzle that seems relevant here. Equally a young composer he studied counterpoint with Arnold Schoenberg who would oftentimes ask his students to provide every possible voice leading solution for a given melody. He would and so enquire, "What is the principle underlying all of the solutions?" It wasn't until years later that Cage realized that what all the solutions had in mutual was the question! (Patterson) The question in that case was defined past the rules of traditional harmony and voice leading. The major question for me has always revolved around form.
Engineers, producers and composers are often preoccupied with the minute details of music and sound, often to the neglect of the big picture. I'm interested to hear how others approach form and look forward to your comments.
Source: https://theproaudiofiles.com/content-form-and-the-empty-container/