Walter Young, Jeff Harrington, Samuel Vriezen, Steve Layton: Excerpt from a newsgroup conversation: Louis Andriessen and "process-music" W.Y.: I like Andriessen's music for the same reason I like Birtwistle's music-- despite the repetitiveness, you get a dramatic sense of visceral outburst that is missing from more "classic" minimalism. that is not to say that loud noises are an excuse for a lack of ideas, but it usually makes for a higher level of contrast than something more cool, seamless or obviously pop-influenced like Torke or Nyman. J.H.: But Birtwistle has an immense number of amazing things going on at once, all of them contributing to the musical momentum as a whole. With Andriessen, I get the feeling that much of the musical decision-making was the result of process - even the dramatic outbursts (OK, time for a BOOM BLAH BLAH). This process-based decision-making style generally leaves me cold. S.V.: I think it would be incorrect to completely deny that; however, Andriessen places high value on 'wrong notes' and composing 'intuitively'. Typically, in discussing a piece, he will start outlining the large-scale form, which is often based on numerical time-proportions, give a long discussion of harmony, talk a lot of cultural history amiable nonsense, then shyly admit that in actual fact the 'system' didn't yield what he wanted and he composed all sections out 'by hand' anyway. Which I believe you can hear -- witness, for instance, the very precise timing of the 144 hammer-chords at the start of De Materie. S.L.: Great point, and an important lesson in what makes many of the "process-theoretical" composers transcend the process itself, and make "art". Schoenberg creates the rules of 12-tone composition, but certainly isn't afraid to pass beyond into the intuitive when called for. Hell, same for Beethoven or Bach! J. H.: Nah... I would strongly object to this statement. Maybe Ockeghem or Josquin could be accused of using process-type methods in their composing... S.V.: First Andriessen, then Ockeghem? Next you'll claim that Feldman or Rihm are a process-composers! J.H.: ...but Beethoven and Bach were definitely more interested in generating and controlling musical and harmonic motion, not in accepting motion as a default part (the ultimate cop out of process piece, IMO) of the process. S. L.: Yeah, but isn't Classical theory really quite process-based? We can build and demonstrate "typical" or "standard" harmonic/melodic progressions taking place in perfectly ordained successions of specific lengths. We can define a theoretically "perfect" sonata form such that it hardly matters what specific melodies or key we choose; the transformations will be this many, happen in this proportion, recur precisely so, etc... Of course, it's almost never precisely so, because each composer pushed, stretched, or went beyond the process' definition. And so in equal measure I think the same happens now, with newer structures, and that the number of "pure" process composers is just as tiny as in the earlier traditions. J. H.: When motion is your primary goal, the process is immediately expendable. When you pick textures and procedures which seem to generate a motion-like feeling, what you are saying with the music is entirely different. It's no longer about the listening experience, per se, but primarily focussed on the necessities of maintaining the process model. Again, a cop out, IMO and a way to avoid the difficulties inherent in composing. A function of our age... a function of what artists can "get away with." S.V.: Well, I suggest you try to find Andriessen's De Snelheid (Velocity) because it addresses exactly your point - motion vs. harmonic motion. S. L.: Jeff, what you describe would be a "cop out", as you say; but such a thing seems almost nonexistent to me. The Glass of Einstein is only nominally paying tribute to process; the unfolding of each counting sequence (and all it carries with it) is hardly formalist, and quite unpredictable. Even a strict Reich "phase" piece is not so much about the preordained as about hearing the surprise, the unexpected, along the way; even more fully confirmed when Reich begins to stress motivic elements that emerge from subjectively-heard cross relations. Much of Xenakis' "theory" seems not so much "pre-" as "post-" ... a way to justify or validate some intuitive sketch of shapes and forms made on a napkin in a quick moment. Cage is an interesting, slightly reversed, example of this; through his career vacillated between very strict process and order in service to the purely intuitive and beyond. Even late, while the material and/or the governing mechanisms are highly intuitive, there always seems to be a methodical and objective coolness in the actual working out of the piece. Cage always seems to have have wanted a kind of release of control to some force outside himself; and in a sense this is essentially identical with the theoretical goal of most strict process-based theory and polemic. J. H.: I found all of these composers boring as hell because of their obsession less with momentum and its dramatic control more with the working out of the process. All of them abandoned musical decision-making (or at least gave up a lot of it) for the ease of composing with formulae. S. L.: I don't see it. Usually there's always "momentum" because there's always change. Almost every work is concerned with transformations; they're still going from a point A to a point B. The number of works that aren't is a tiny fraction (and Cage might be the biggest part of that fraction). And short of some kinds of free improvisation, I have to think that we're all composing with some kind of formulae; they're unavoidable, even as we push up against the edges of one or steal a thought from another. J. H.: Again, I think this is a cop out... primarily a function of personal laziness and the difficulty of making really good musical decisions. IMO. S. L.: While the transformative, time-and-goal-oriented experience is a huge part of most of our musical nature, there's also a kind of tendency or ability to visualize a piece in almost an architectural way; like an elegant clockwork that both moves and just IS, or like a perfectly proportioned bridge or cathedral. It certainly seems just as valid a guiding principle for many. S.V.: I sort of agree, Jeff, that you see Cage, Reich and Xenakis as process-composers, and now that your use of the term is getting more and more clear to me, I insist that Andriessen might look like one but is not. I think Cage's one or two musical decisions per piece were a lot stronger than those by some people who could make a million of them in every piece and it's the strength of the idea that counts, not its quantity. J.H.: Give me a break! I knew a friend of Cage's (James Drew) who used to tell me that Cage spent an inordinate amount of time making his pieces sound "good" even after the processing was done. But one or two decisions doth not an art work make! S.V.: And then there is the story about 74, an orchestral piece composed on the day he got the commission... Cage got quite a bit more prolific when he started using the computer. J.H.: The only two composers I've heard that make truly beautiful and perfect music with processes are Ockeghem and Bach (in the Musical Offering) and the Bach pieces are light-weights compared to his more composed works. S.V.: Okay, it's getting less and less clear now. What is so processual about Ockeghem and Bach? Ockeghem's constructive devices are notoriously well-hidden in his best works. Is simply writing a canon already 'process'? J.H.: Duh? The rule drives the music? Strict adherence to the rule? S.V.: So? Does that make for less musical decisions? I don't think so, and I think Bach's example shows. Just look at the hyper intense gestural activity you get in a canon such as the inverse augmentation canon of the Art of Fugue! That's a far cry from 'Frère Jacques'. I never heard Ockeghem's 36-part canon, his strictest exercise in the form, but I think for all technical ingenuity Missa Prolationum is rather free in design. Writing canons doesn't really make for less decisions - it's still a choice between 12, 7 or whatever, 3 pitches at every moment, to put it bluntly and I'm not even counting rhythms, gestures... and all these decisions have to be made 10 times or more per bar... qua decisions, canon or no canon is sort of a difference between googolplex possibilities and a millionth that number ones.