“A musical work is never really there: it always needs intermediaries who, through performance, help to clarify and interpret the relationship - always somewhat open - between the idea and its realisation. A musical idea that does not carry with itself and within itself the terms of its concrete realisation simply does not exist or only exist poorly, or, as we shall see later, becomes something else. A musical work’s so-called openness can be found, located or developed in different places: in the conception of the work, in the performance and the listening to the work, or, and this is the most likely case, in all three places at once.” p.80
“A conception of musical forms that tends towards openness implies the desire - if not exactly the possibility - to follow and develop formal pathways which are alternative, unexpected, non-homogeneous, and most important, not linear. But alternative and unexpected with respect to what? Obviously, mainly with respect to terms established by the composer in the actual conception of the work. In any work that can be defined as opem, there is an obvious paradox. In the listening time, though not in the space of the page written by the composer, the result - even with its most complex identity - will always be unambiguous and not open. The page written by the composer will always be the equivalent of a notepad, of a logbook in which different episodes of the creative process are recorded. The performer can wonder through the episodes, pass from one to another, ignore some, and invent an order of succession. In doing this, if the musical substance of the ship’s log is of great interest, it will enrich the performer’s experience, and gratify his or her musical intelligence. It can be argued that the idea of predisposing one material capable of giving rise to multiple forms - in itself intellectually and poetically very attractive - is intrinsic to any creative process even to one that aims at the construction of a work that ultimately always begin, proceeds, and ends in the same way. The problem is that this kind of formal multiplicity is somewhat aristocratic because it can only be perceived by the composer, by the performer, or by someone who has had the opportunity to listen to two interpretations or versions of the same work in a row. p. 80-81
Avoiding “a proper distinction between musical and literary concepts” p. 82
“Eco says: ‘The form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood.” p. 82
“He [Eco] also says that a musical work can be open in a tangible sense, and that it can be concretely unfinished. The author, Eco says, seems to hand the performer the pieces of a construction kit, being rather unconcerned about their eventual deployment." p.83
“It is true that a systematic and fanatically numerical procedure may turn out to be analogous, in its perceptible results, to a random procedure. It is equally undeniable that the awareness of this relative similarity of results is at the root of many significant musical achievements of the last decades. On the other hand, this coincidencia oppositorium, this perspective coincidence of opposites, has been responsible for a number of disasters in both camps; it has become something of an alibi, not conceptually and behaviourally. It led composers - both the obsessively systematic as well as the rigorously random - not to assume all of their perspective responsibilities: the combinatory processes of the former and the chance operations of the latter generated, each in its own way, a similar statistical distribution of interval, durations, register, and so forth. This is how, in some cases, any sense of from or structure - as open and complex as you wish - seemed to have vanished, and in order to bring the collapse structure back to life some brutal formal interventions were needed, having, more often than not, to incoherence and to the renouncing of something vague that was not really there. p. 84-85
"Is it possible to promote a relationship of reciprocity between systematic procedures on the one hand and random procedures on the other? If such an encounter is to become significant, it must be possible to locate it on a structural platform capable first of all to endow the various behaviours with essentially local functions, distinct from each other but open-ended. They must relate to each other in a way similar to that among harmonic elements and those of tempo and timbre, which can be approached locally, but at the same time they take on and contribute to a more general, global meaning. In a musical construction, local and momentary disorders must be able to interact with equally temporary regularities, synchronies, recurrences and symmetries - just as, in language, sounds on the one hand and noises on the other, vowels and consonants, periodicity and statistical distribution, interact and interpenetrate with each other. Just as, finally, the idea of open form must be able to compete, not to say alternate, with the idea of closed form. Certainly, they are also complementary, for better or for worse they are inseparable, and, more often than might be expected, they may need each other.” p. 87-88
Comment:
- In the process of composing, everything that it is not planned can happen.
“ 'You cannot work on one thing with your hands’ — he [Michelangelo] himself wrote — ’and another thing with your head, especially when it comes to marble’ “ p. 89
Comment:
- composing is a connection between body and brain; method and random decisions/actions.
Metaphor:
- using a map in a journey as a guide:
- map = score
- journey = music
- guide = guide
(=) score as a guide for the music
“A musical text, in the mind of its composer, may take the shape of perfectly closed and conceptually sealed entity. To an interpreter, the same text may on thew contrary appear open-ended and fraught with structurally significant alternatives. But a text may also appear open-ended to its composer and closed to its interpreter.” p. 92
“Listening to ‘openness’ is always a dilemma. A musical event may present us with extremely complex, chaotic, and diversified sound situations (the musical equivalent of a video-clip commanded by a random program). This will lead us to look for a single out their common aspects, and we will certainly fine some, given the already stated fact that, once a point of view has been established, everything can be related by analogy, continuity, and similarity to everything else. At the other extreme, a homogeneous and immobile musical event (the musical equivalent of a face that never changes its expressions) will stimulate us to pick out the slightest differences and variations.
It is obvious that the greater the number and diversity of the elements at play, the greater will be the need (and also the difficulty) to identify the reason for their coexistence — even despite the author’s intentions. It is equally obvious that the fewer the number and diversity of the elements, the more specific and discrete will be the details useful for a possible interpretation. We have on the one hand a virtual and indecipherable ‘macro-form’, and on the other an easily perceptible and segmentable ‘microform’ “ p. 95-96