As a composer/sound artist, I have never been comfortable with the generally accepted definition of music. It usually comes laden with the subjective baggage of ‘pleasing’, ’emotional’, ‘melodious’, etc. As a result, I call myself a sound artist which, at least to my thinking, has a more neutral connotation.
Although my listening tastes are very catholic – that is to say wide-ranging, when I ponder my place in the ever-expanding universe of sonic material, the work I have been doing for quite some time now seems to migrate into the amorphous and opaque realm of barely definable sound. To borrow a phrase coined by a composer who influenced my trajectory at an early age, I am also inclined to call it ‘organized sound’, another less subjective term. And given the fact that I am disinclined to associate the sound work I create with any genre, I simply choose to use a generic, all-inclusive name for it.
Another aspect of the music/sound art realm that I ponder is the seemingly distinct, but actually intertwined relationship between formalism and spontaneity. Much of my work is based on spontaneity and improvisation. Sometimes it is realized within the more traditional framework associated with jazz; a genre of music that has influenced me greatly. However, that genre, for the most part, comes with its own formalism. A jazz piece usually has a more formal starting point: a standard melody, called the head, which is then used as a jumping-off point for improvisation on that melodic and harmonic material. This implies its own type of formalism, which in some cases is as strict as it is in classical music, but which is augmented by the improvisation upon that basic formula.
One of the sub-genres of jazz that comes closer to what I aspire to in my work is free jazz, a movement that started appearing in the late fifties in the U.S. and Europe, which in many cases replaced the formal baggage associated with the head, melody and harmony, for a much more spontaneous expression of improvisation. Artists such as Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Derek Bailey, Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman, to name just a few, began creating in such a way, and opening up a whole new arena for performers and composers to explore extended ways of producing sound. However, the concept of formalism still survives in even the most extreme examples of this type of music.
These formalistic concepts find their way into other areas, such as what I will call, for lack of a better term, classical electronic music, as well as in aleatoric music, pioneered by such composers as John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Woolf, et. al. Many of these composers came from more formal musical backgrounds and then expanded their horizons to include more spontaneous and improvisatory expressions. However, and this is where it gets interesting (at least for me), there are composers like Milton Babbitt and Karlheinz Stockhausen, to name just two, who embraced the concept of total serialism in their music, taking Schoenberg’s twelve tone system of composition and adding to it by applying the concept to timbre, tempo, volume, etc. The results, in many cases, of this type of hyper-formalism yielded pieces which, to my ears at least, sound very similar to some aleatoric and spontaneous music. And, as Duke Ellington said, if it sounds good, it is good. Enough for now.