Form and Method: Composing Music

The Rothschild Essays

Roger Reynolds, Stephen McAdams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9789057551581
  9789057551369
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134733903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

First Published in 2007. This volume is a collection of a series of six illustrated lectures that demonstrate a picture of the author's evolved thinking about the composing of music: both from a more general, overall perspective and from that of the particular moment-to-moment decision making that, gradually accumulating, brings a whole into being.

Form and Method:
Composing Music

I

Introductory Remarks

It is only fair to emphasize at the outset that I am content with the pragmatic advantages of plausibility rather than attempting to probe in words for anything like absolute principles. My thoughts arise out of and find what validity they have in my work over thirty years as a composer of musical experiences. Theories, I have found, are sometimes interesting but they often tend to become problematic — both disruptive and self-justifying — in application. I don't have theories. I have ways. It is also the case that I don't think consciously about many of the ideas expressed here while I am working. The procedures I have come to trust have for me the immediate effect of off-loading an unhealthy and encumbering level of basic, strategic, and analytical thought while I am composing. They allow the actual engagement with musical tasks to become more immediate, engrossing, and even innocent. My effort, then, has been to devise procedures that not only guide the ongoing composition itself — the evolving web of explicit choices — once it has begun, but also that precede and prepare for this actual composition, thereby freeing me for direct engagement with specific and already delimited choices: which one now? and next?

Form is critical to longevity — redeeming even dated materials — but contemporary factors mitigate against its having a decisive role in determining which music prospers. There is, for example, a drive towards the marketing utility of premières, and a work written with the realities of contemporary American musical life in mind will need to be straightforward if it is to be registered accurately (or even serviceably) by a sympathetic listener at first hearing. There is a strong bias toward the conventional shape, a disincentive for bestowing particular attention on any aspect of musical discourse which is unlikely to have its full impact at first encounter. It is evident to me that this tendency, if it continues, will greatly diminish the potential long-term contribution we in our time make both to music and the continuity of its repertoire.

I believe that form is a critical subject requiring our attention all the more now in view of the foregoing. The subject of method, in its turn is uncomfortably situated between the implausibly thorough and the unsatisfactorily informal or slight. Although I have never taught any of the following explicitly, I certainly do teach out of such awareness. Only an occasion such as an appointment as Randolph Rothschild Guest Composer at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University (1992-1993) could have led me to write in these relatively formal terms. Evidently, in one's own workroom it is only necessary to do what one has learned to do. Here, however, my task has been to draw the reader's attention to the landscape of concerns and pathways that are characteristic of my work. I have not tried to write down a fully developed continuity of procedure, only to suggest its components. To do otherwise would have implied the presence of theories which, as I have written, I prefer to avoid.

Let's begin.

Essay 1: Form

Definition/Sources of Form

Wholeness is the critical sine qua non of a musical work. A true composition is not only a remark or stance or display, but a dimensional experience that either leads the listener along a path or proposes a landscape for exploration in such a way that an arc, a trajectory of proposal, engagement, and response has been traversed by its end.

Integrity and coherence arise from the persuasiveness of the sense of belonging one has in the presence of the work's elements, large and small. Integrity can be thought of as a measure of the completeness that accrues to the pattern of objective relationships that underlie a work, whereas coherence relates to completeness within the web of subjective implications aroused. A successful composition addresses both objective and rational as well as subjective and emotional wholeness (cf. Fig. 1).

Each detail is ideally as characteristic of the whole as the impact of the work in its entirety. This has to do with the "sense of belonging" mentioned above. The local event anticipates the macro level in some way just as the overall form invites its detail. If an occurrence at either the micro or macro level does not, in the end, find a plausible place in the listener's overall picture, the form is weakened. If there is insufficient interplay between his grasp of the moment and his comprehension of the gradually accreting whole, the form fails.

Since integration is fundamental, then, how are we to examine an aspect of the whole without at the same time contending with everything? If one is explicating a composer's

Figure 1

perspective, as distinct from a listener's (whether analytically minded or not), one has an advantage. Fortunately, that is my circumstance here. I am writing about the way music is made, and it is clear that musical works are not fully formed expanses to which a composer gains gradual access as, so to speak, the fog lifts revealingly. (One thinks of the melodrama of postWorld War II movies: is that the dim outline of a plane? is it the one that promises escape? Everyone sits forward in his chair and squints.)

Rather than being suddenly revealed, whole, a musical work is achieved gradually over time in a manner that doubtless varies for each composer: part discovery, part construction, even, admittedly, part contrivance (and, if poet John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is to be believed, also part sheer undirected bumbling). But, in most cases, there is a necessary (though by no means uniform) staging involved in the process of completing a musical composition. We can thus inquire into the process recognizing it as a multileveled search for ultimate integration rather than the unrolling of a scroll upon which has been inscribed an already, mystically completed continuity that one needs only to receive. There may have been periods in which individuals (a Mozart) might have gained access to a whole form and its content in this "received" fashion, but ours is not (as certainly Beethoven's was not) of such stripe.

My experience suggests one perspective on the compositional process. Once it is at least tentatively known what the expressive intention of the piece is to be, the issues to be addressed in each project can be reduced to three questions of the following sort:

What kind of overall shape is likely to work?

What are the most appropriate materials?

What procedures will best serve to elaborate the chosen materials toward the large-scale form?

Admittedly, order here is a variable matter. Arid, of course, the expressive intent of the work is itself an aspect of the desirable preliminary debate. For my purposes, I assume that an expressive intention precedes the address of technical capacity. Nevertheless, one might begin almost anywhere on what is, for me, the closed, interdependent path of consideration between form, material, and method (cf. Fig. 2).

Figure 2

Figure 3

At the most elevated level, I believe, there is form; at the most basic, material; and mediating in the middle there is method, the means by which the composer transforms the small into the large, ensuring that the first two do not become estranged in the process. One can, admittedly, consider these related aspects of composition from the top down or from the bottom up, but my predilection has always been for the former. My expressive intentions seem almost always bound closely to an idea of or commitment to a formal shape. Indeed, until this formal shaping has become whole enough, my intuition resists any effort of the intellect to proceed at all (cf. Fig. 3).

I have used the phrase "expressive intent" several times, and should pause for a moment to add that I intend expression to be th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I: The Text
• Part II: The Examples