The Embodied Perspective
Final reflections
Initially, for the composition of this piece, I came up with a conceptual framework that describes a process of organizing musical material in connection with rhetoric and computational algorithms. I termed it musical procedural rhetoric. The process aims to exemplify how the logic and procedural nature of constrained computation can be harnessed to create complex musical narratives inspired by rhetorical figures. However, as speech is not merely the recombination of phonemes or a text is not just the permutation of letters, the idea of musical procedural rhetoric as a formalistic process quickly fell short of yielding a potentially expressive musical narrative.
After several revisions, it became necessary for me to start playing the cello for myself and listening to what was sounding, evaluating the playability of the material, assessing the tradeoffs between difficulty and sound result, and ultimately, judging the result aesthetically. The score ended up having twenty-nine versions. The last of them, I am quite proud of. But to get there, a lot of de-formalization was applied to it. It was only when the piece resonated with my own physical experience of it that it truly made sense.
There is a strong connection between an embodied approach and an intuitive mode of thinking, with the boundaries between them being difficult to define. Ultimately, in this piece, composing became a process of exploring the materiality of procedural constructive methods. It was experiential while still retaining a computational quality, though in a different sense. Potentially, in this later process, the term procedural might apply less to computational algorithms and more to physical possibilities, limitations, and even motor automatisms.
Then the question –as with the versificator– arises again. Is it worth formalizing everything if later everything will be de-formalized? An attempt to answer that question would be counterfactual. Ultimately, I believe that all these computational experiments gave me something that became the rock over which I started carving. They underlie the music. After all, as Lachenmann says, “composing is like building a car that breaks down while driving.”* This quote was mentioned by my supervisor, Dániel Péter Biró in the context of the regular meetings of the Composition Seminar at the Grieg Academy (University of Bergen). I very much agree with him on this one.
Ultimately, I believe that an audience hardly ever judges the value of a methodology. The audience ultimately judges the aesthetic value of the sound result of a musical work. Most of the time, the methodology is completely foreign to a listener, and well be it.
What kind of reflections would it bring to judge the aesthetical value of a methodology? Something like: “Wow, I love the pitch order of that row” or “What an expressive permutation of articulations!”
The significant physicality involved in the later creative process of the piece made things more clear to me in this sense. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a formalistic and structuralist compositional approach should be avoided. It could be productive, or at least, as I see it through my process for this piece, a starting point to start and explore: a good form of lightning the musical match.