Void Series

Words from the Dissertation - link to the whole document

 The Void Series is a collection of pieces in which rhythmic values are reduced to two generalized durations with extended periods of silence, displayed by stark, often nearly empty scores. At the time of this writing, the series consists of eleven pieces: four solo pieces, two duets, two trios, two quartets, and one quintet. The text of these scores is minimal, consisting only of a relative proportional approach to duration: “Whole notes are long. Black notes are shorter” with the additional indication that there is “time between staves.” This open approach to temporality leads to extreme variability while remaining fixed to specific, sequentially occurring series of events and pitch-content. The fourth movement of Codex Symphonia is itself a Void Piece for flute, viola, and harp. While the exact notation is executed using notation software, the methodology of performance is essentially the same.

Looking at this calligraphic information alone, one would expect a great deal of variability on every given playthrough. This is true on a micro-level: every duration will be slightly different each time, and the time between staves is not specified. The piece could take 20 minutes or 20 hours and either interpretation would be “correct” as the players of these pieces create their own tempo and establish a shared understanding of time. However, if I may explore this notion anecdotally, in my experience playing and recording these pieces, the tempo of a given work has been relatively consistent with each run through it. The first time we play through a piece, a collective agreement on relative tempo/duration is established that remains relatively unchanged and is often undiscussed, creating a semi-fixed, collective impression of “what the piece is." At the time of writing this document, only one of these pieces has been performed live in front of an audience, yet all of them have been recorded. In these recordings, the score may have only been surveyed for a few moments; the rendering of the work comes to a point of intuitive performance rather than the strict recreation of a disciplined practice or the attempted recreation of an idealized or previous experience. Still, this is only one ensemble of trusty musical comrades; who is to say that anyone will ever play these pieces again? Does this recording then provide evidence to, or fully constitute what the piece is in some sort of definitive way? In my opinion the answer is no, but this is perhaps not yet the time to fully unpack this topic. For the time being, this ontological elusively, this spiraling out of the performance practice is brought up as an important reflection on the writing of these pieces but also as a primer to the core conceptual value of the series.

My understanding of these works is indebted to Stephanie Rosenthal’s survey of the black, monochromatic works of abstract expressionists and associated artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Frank Stella. Though I began these pieces before reading Rosenthal’s work, her survey gave a focus to the core conceptual value of them, mainly the notions of emptiness and purity. Speaking of Rauschenberg, Rosenthal observes that the painter used to clean the canvas and probe the limits of what constituted the image.[1] In a similar way with the Void Pieces, I sought to probe the limits of what constituted musical connectivity: can one hear or perceive continuity when not only the performers push the limit of their own musical memory with large sections of silence, but the compositional process itself involves the same separation from the material.[2]  Or more abstractly: by asking what shape lacks form, how can micro-level gestures betray a sense of macro-level formal structures when punctuated by expanses of silence, yet still retaining the cohesion as a single work. Rosenthal describes this as the viewer experiencing the present in a pure state, uncontaminated by the past and future: “contemplating the painting, the viewer is led to his or her inner being by the harmony and virtual invisibility of the image.”[3]

According to Deleuze, perception is subtractive, producing an experience via a need or interest minus that which does not interest the viewer/listener.[4] Ad Reinhardt shared a similar view stating that his first black paintings were a “pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relation-less, disinterested painting; an object that is self-conscious (not unconsciousness), ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing [sic] but art."[5] If we follow Deleuze’s reasoning here, and translate it into a musical context, a work of pure perception (much like the aura described in the previous section) can be reduced to the experience of a generalized harmonic impression coupled with the experience of time. In the case of my own Void Pieces, a similar conceptual framework is used to approach each piece; the material is comprised of the faint interactions of tones within the color palette of each instrument or instrumental combination. At the same time, as Reinhardt argued that he was not interested in the art of color but the art of painting, [6] with the later Void Pieces I formalized a method of creating the works in which the act of writing played an equally significant role in the final work than the individual musical moments.

With the first two pieces in the series, Available Light (2020) and The Proverbial You (2020), the pitch content was derived by the composition of a simple short melody that was then rhythmically augmented to the extreme with the addition of extended periods of silence creating a discontinuity of the melodic framework. Later, as the pieces became more ambitious and the performing forces grew larger, my focus shifted to the interaction of instruments rather than the continuity of harmonic material. In the context of these later pieces, the practice of intuition became critical: the pieces were written linearly, working until a point of exhaustion or loss of attention, at which point I would walk away from the piece. When the decision to walk away was made, there was no going back; the day’s work would not be returned to, looked at, or analyzed but would be hidden from view and, to the best of my ability, committed to memory or otherwise discarded. When the mood or thought of the piece would come back to me, the same process of intuitive composition would repeat itself with the intention of this new material following linearly from the previous. What occurs then is the annihilation of formal construction and a shift to the compositional act as a creative space.

In some sense, this is reminiscent of chance operations, but is distinct in that each musical utterance is the result of careful consideration to the depth of any focused or explicitly created piece, as it is within the depths of musical understanding in which intuitive musical practices may be derived. This is the case even in the private act of composition, or in more abstracted terms within the calligraphic artistic practice of score-making. In other words, by focusing on the process rather than the product and honoring the transitory nature of both, I am attempting to connect an observation of intertextual awareness that I, the composer, am part of a network of ideas, minds, texts and not a separable point of awareness.

Crossley defines music as necessarily being within a relationship of a “creating” actor and a “listening” actor, but makes the important distinction that these two actors may occupy the same physical body.[7] However, Crossley makes the important observation that the isolated music-making actor is not without influence from the expanded network of musical texts and knowledge handed down to them by their own experiences all the way down, stating: “[t]heir capacity to make music presupposes, and is dependent upon the input of others, albeit perhaps not right there and then.” In other words, the intuitive act of score-making using this methodology represents a connection to the diffuse and vast network of my musical experience rather than complete annihilation of musical intention or meaning. As observed by Rosenthal: “the kind of excitation envisioned by Reinhardt was pragmatic rather than nihilistic in the philosophical sense of the negation of all knowledge and every truth. It did not signal the ‘end’ of art, but rather a ‘manifestation without form or content, outside space and time, in painting of what constitutes the essence of art after the removal of all non-artistic and accidental aspects of elements.’”[8]

The extreme reduction of material then represents not a limit of potential options, but an act of nominating them despite their transitory nature within the vast universe of possibilities. This concept is seen all the way down when one considers the score-making/writing of the works in addition to the practice of their performance. The “void” then is a non-empty expanse of extreme potentiality; it is perhaps improbable, but always possible. As will be observed later in this document, this notation of improbable possibility and the nomination of material is an essential component of my compositional process at-large, but is highlighted by this series in a concentrated, perhaps “economical” way.

[1] Stephanie Rosenthal, Black Paintings (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 2006), 30.
[2] See following page.
[3] Rosenthal, 40.
[4] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1986), 63.
[5] “Ad Reinhardt. Abstract Painting. 1963: Moma,” The Museum of Modern Art, accessed December 28, 2021, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78976.
[6] Rosenthal, 37.
[7] Nick Crossley, Connecting Sounds: The Social Life of Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2020), 11.
[8] Rosenthal, 40.

List of works in the Void Series

Available Light (2020), for solo violin - score | recording

This is not a mirror (2020), for solo vibraphone - score | recording

the preverbal you (2020), for solo bass flute - score | recording

aunque es de noche (2020), for solo voice - score | [not yet recorded]

Fait Echoes of Felt Thought (2021), for flute, clarinet, harp, celesta, and viola - score | recording

You May Feel Yourself Entering a Myth (2021), for piano quintet - score | recording

We Are Done For in the Most Remarkable Ways (2021), for viola and piano - score | recording

Proove Breeze (2021), for piano trio - score | recording

The temper of my Voice drained away (2021), for flute and piano - score | recording

Just Between Us Do You Think We’re Still (2021), for flute, clarinet, piano - score | recording