VART3456 Ideas and Process Week 2 - [Variation Task]

Variation Task:

Each student is to compose a 1-minute piece of music (no longer, no shorter) within the space of a week. The piece can take any form, but must avoid repetition of any kind (this means no repeated melodic lines, motives, sound objects, chord progressions or ostinati).

Criteria:

Successful completion of task and precise duration.

Engaging use of varied material within a short form.

DOWNLOAD: VARIATION TASK WAV 

Readings:

Morton Feldman by Paul Griffiths

Poor Morton was trying to compose algorithmically without a computer! Well, so it appears. This line in particular struck a chord with me, " His lack of an ideology had relegated him to the second rank in the ideological 1950s, when even Cage had had an ideology: the ideology of having no ideology. Also, as a big man, and a man of humour, he perhaps fitted too well the role of comfortable clown."

The Auditive Memory and its function in the late works of Morton Feldman

"By employing such devices in his compositional methods and by making disorientation one of his main concerns, Feldman intentionally confuses our 'living memory', our sense of auditory retention and protention."

My most engaging moments of composing, sound designing or even listening in general have always been in the immersion of near discord, chaotic polyrhythms and long melodic phrases moving in and out of sync. From my experience, there is an inversely proportional dichotomy of those who are immersed best in reductive monotonous rhythm or timbre, and those who achieve that same immersion from the inverse. I can relate to Feldman's "Disorientation" approach, though pieces like 

"Crippled Symmetry"have the opposite effect on me. I find myself fixated on every sound counting the

Silence between each.

Oliver Sacks - "In the moment: music and amnesia"

The hell described in Retrograde Amnesia doubles as an analogy for patternless music/sound/noise. The mind requires pattern, repetition of some kind, retained in the immediate or stored memory to make sense of input. Without this, the mind cannot engage and begins again anew, each fragment of time disconnected from the last. Sometimes the mind projects a perceived pattern onto noise in order to engage with it. True noise cannot contain such patterns.