Percussion in the context of New Music

Jason Treuting’s presentation brought percussion in the context of new music to the forefront of my mind. I find percussion to be one of the most interesting instrument because it’s one that is still extremely young and constantly evolving, so therefore extremely compatible with the ever shifting landscape of new music.

Starting mainly with Luigi Russolo’s “Art of Noise,” noise instruments have become more and more common in general repertoire. Percussion instruments being perhaps the first proper manifestation of this idea, it makes sense that Cage stated this in his “The Future of Music – Credo:”

Any sound is acceptable to the composer of percussion music; he explores the academically forbidden «nonmusical» field of sound insofar as is manually possible… As soon as these methods are crystallized into one or several widely accepted methods, the means will exist for group improvisations of unwritten but culturally important music [to exist] (Cage).

To sort of unpack this, it seems to be widely accepted that the direction that percussion music naturally leads composers towards is one that is a huge step in the evolution and advancement of new music overall. Treuting’s path is a wonderful example of this.

In classical orchestras, percussion is arguably used solely to ornament and emphasize, and never as a focal point within the ensemble. When virtuosic percussionists needed to be satisfied, composers had to turn away from classical western music and look to “world music;” They had to find parameters to explore outside of tonal melodic movement, and turn to noise and more gestural movements; Rhythm had to be expanded upon past duple versus triple and become complex polyrhythms, as well as important structural scaffolding and a musical motif. These are all goals that are extremely prevalent in new music in general.

Therefore as soon as I began to see what sort of music Treuting gravitates towards composing and his core idea that all sounds are music, I became extremely excited. He is truly a composer worth noting because he is one forged in a crucible of new music as well as a burgeoning instrument – exactly the type of person Cage predicted would be created and that would help push music forward. Which funny enough Cage seems to be a direct compositional predecessor to Treuting. More specifically, they both share a focus on the individuality of performances and the role of the composer as more of a guide and organizer rather than a creator or leader. This compositional method for Cage seems to be influenced by his religion and investment in philosophy; For Treuting, however, it seems to stem from his forced collaboration as a percussionist left with vague suggestions from composers and his experience as a performer (and therefore more a collaborator rather than leader).

In a time where fixed media is at such a height of popularity due to it’s ease of access and the sheer amount of control it gives creators over a piece of art – especially the ability to make a piece “perfect” – it is extremely refreshing to have artists like Treuting strive to put value into individual performances again, and to see risks not only be taken but to be embraced. For me, as well as being a great excuse to analyze percussion in this context, his presentation was a good reminder that music is expression: it is meant to be risky, there are meant to be mistakes and disagreements in collaboration – and that as composers perhaps we should remember that using sample packs is the easy way out of something difficult. I don’t believe all of his composition methods are for me, but there is definitely something for me to take away from them.

Jason Treuting - Qualms with Sudoku

Jason Treuting spoke to our class this week about some of the percussion pieces he has written. I think one of the major takeaways that many of us had was that he is a believer that “all sound is music,” the idea that anything audible could be considered musical and there is no line distinguishing noise from art. One of the pieces that he shared with us was based on the idea of sudoku puzzles which contain nine numbers horizontally and vertically in a grid pattern, similar to 12 tone rows. I was particularly interested in the idea of this piece because I am addicted to solving sudoku puzzles. I try to complete a Sudoku puzzle every day during my commute to school or back again. I expected him to go into detail about his thought process and an explanation of the guidelines he provided to the performers of the piece. However, I was a little bit disappointed that he did not explain the exact process that he went through to compose the peace, nor do I think I fully understood how performers understood what they were playing while I watched the video of the body percussion performance that he shared with us.

It was interesting to see that the music that each of the players was following was just the nine rows of numbers, but at what point was there a difference between music that Jason had written and music that the performers were just making up on the spot? Obviously, there were some parameters that they were following to end up at rhythms and patterns that sounded to be in sync with one another, but maybe the audience needs to know what those parameters are to be able to fully appreciate the piece and the concept behind it, otherwise who’s to say that the music wasn’t just made up in the moment?

I think some of these thoughts stem from my general dislike of music that must be co-written by the performer at the time of the rehearsal or performance. Although Jason did not fully disclose the guidelines given to the performers, it was clear that they are given a massive amount of responsibility by being provided with a minimal amount of music to follow and therefore must create much of the piece themselves. I understand that many people enjoy this type of collaboration, but I prefer to write and listen to music where musicians collaborate through their interpretation and do not have to worry about being a co-composer.

One Minute of Music (SORRY THIS IS SO LATE)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjTyrfmO_Mw

blu and exile- my world is

Used to listen to this a ton in early high school--gave birth to this idea of really strong samples (musical objects) being placed together, a kind of thing I like to do in my own work

Reflections On Jason Treuting

Jason Treuting's presentation brought about a variety of interesting questions. While I would say our compositional strategies are actually quite different, there are certainly things that I find very engaging about his process, even if I don't always enjoy the aesthetic result. There are many pieces of his that I do enjoy though, but in his compositional strategy they can sometimes be a hit or miss for me. Let me elaborate:

One quality that I find fascinating is how he removes himself from his work. It's no surprise he takes his cues from John Cage, the master of that kind of objectivity. Beginning from the Sonata and Interludes, moving to Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape no. 4, and culminating in 4'33'', there is this gradual insistence that his presence in his music be meaningless, that for sound to really be just sound he himself must not filter it through his own aesthetic hierarchies. As a result, John Cage produces work that is paradoxically very separate from himself as it is inalienably him, setting up this wall that makes it hard to critique the music itself but rather the rules that set it in place. I see a similar paradox (to perhaps a slightly lesser degree) in the work of Treuting, and one that poses some concerns to his own conceptions of his music.

Towards the end of his lecture, Treuting said that he doesn't think it's important for audiences to know the system that warrants the musical result, and that one can enjoy the aesthetic output without knowledge of the rules that made it so. However the sound is never consistently his own, but the rules are. And perhaps this could be a side-effect of being a composition student hard-wired for criticism, but evaluating the piece and critiquing the structure and the musical material can only really be based on the rules that set it in place, rules of which the audience may not be aware of. The effect becomes this weird separation between audience member and composer, which has its own pros and cons naturally. This isn't to say though that all music must have audible process, but I think (and this could just be my musical bias) that an acknowledgement of the audience/listener experience is important in making pieces that glue to them. It's not manipulation so much as it is cuing into one's bolder musical objects in one's piece, not conceptual. 

As I write this, I realize the paradoxes in my own thinking on this subject. I would never want music to be one thing, especially the things that I only like. But it becomes hard to me to enjoy some of Treuting's music without understanding the mechanisms that birthed it, since I cannot hear them. And the only reason why I can say that is because Treuting's pieces at the CME performance did not strike me as engaging on their own, but when the context was made aware, they did. That's not to say that I don't like his other work that invokes this enigmatic process and produces similar aesthetically results. Some of his pieces, in their somewhat static arc, offer a totally different listening experience for me that I do enjoy. However I found the musical material in Homage to the Triad to not justify the duration, and for me the piece, while it had cool moments, didn't satiate my auditory desire. 

Jason Treuting

Jason Treuting brought many interesting compositional approaches to Composer's Forum this week. Jason is very dedicated to his approach – giving performer’s lots of creative control and working with processes – which makes sense given his background as a percussionist. As he mentioned, percussionists are often given vague guidelines such as “metal: high and low” and left to decide what that means. Though some performers may desire more direction, Jason loves this creative control and wants to give the same to his performers. However, in the world of open-parameter composition, there are many fine lines to take into consideration.

One fine line to consider is how many guidelines does it take for the piece to be “composed”? In thinking of this, we may consider improvisatory pieces by composers like John Zorn and Christopher Burns. Zorn’s Cobra is essentially a set of cards that a conductor can use to impose rules on an ensemble’s improvisation. Burn’s Injunctions is similar, but uses a set of memorized hand signals with no conductor. If these pieces never sound the same, are they really the same “composition”? While most of Jason’s music isn’t improvised, it does often consist of performer’s constructing their own version of his pieces with their own found materials. The general effect of the piece remains, but the performance differs from performer to performer. I do believe a composition can be a general concept that spawns many variations, but the concept must be strong enough carry some consistency between each performance. This is what makes pieces like Riley’s In C so successful.

Another fine line a composer would need to consider is what parameters can they leave entirely up to the performer? Jason indicated that he leaves pitch up to his performers, but has rarely experienced major variation in what people choose. Does this mean we should let performance practice become a substitute for some notations in our music? I admire Jason’s dedication to leaving parameter’s fully in control of the performer, but also think simple safe-guards like “pitches from any mode” can prevent performances outside of the aesthetic we have in mind. Of course, that risk is something Jason may find appealing.

I found the Contemporary Music Ensemble concert of his music quite enjoyable. There was a nice variety of music that I felt captured Jason’s spirit quite well. Along the lines of Zorn and Burns, Treuting’s piece Oblique Music for Four Plus made nice reference to Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards. The last piece on the program, Homage to the Triad, seemed longer than it needed to be, but I still found it interesting to watch his process of creating the gradually changing paintings in tandem with the ensemble’s slowly shifting music. I particularly appreciated that he performed with the CME, even though they were showcasing his compositional work. I’m glad to see the composer-performer identity becoming more present in our community. While academia is still not geared in this direction, it is inspiring to see people like Jason Treuting, Caroline Shaw, and Nathalie Joachim leading careers that are not limited to one traditional path.

Thoughts on Jason Treuting

Last Monday we were visited by Jason Treuting, composer and founding member of So Percussion, who gave us a quick tour of his work and his interests as a creative, and subsequently presented an evening of music in Loewe with NYU’s own Contemporary Music Ensemble. 

I found Jason to be a very engaging person whose curiosity and love for music was palpable in everything he said. I was also refreshed by his mindset as a percussionist, that through his music he seemed to argue that anything can become a percussion instrument, and that performers can and should take it upon themselves to take part in the creative process of a piece. As a composer, I have always struggled to feel comfortable giving so much agency to my performers as to give them some of the creative control of the piece, so I found fascinating his pursuit of music that, in his words, can be interpreted by many different performers with many different instrumentations, yet still sound like his (Jason’s) music. 

All said, though, I have been wrestling with a question that Erich posed, of if Jason cared whether or not the compositional processes he uses in his work are—or should be—perceivable by his audience, regardless of their musicianship and without an explanation of the process. The question came out of Jason’s presentation of his Sudoku piece, where musicians solve sudoku puzzles and then carry out processes dictated by Jason’s instructions that turn the puzzle into a musical score. His answer was that he wanted his music to hit people in 2 places, both of which he argued were completely valid: the academic, intellectual one, where the interest would be in the process; and the visceral one, where the audience would listen and be captivated/find meaning without needing to know why.

I coincidentally explored this same question with my roommate only a few days prior, in a debate over Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase”, and the central question we came to was this: is the process that takes place in any piece of music enough to give it value and meaning in the minds of its audience? Or does a piece like “Piano Phase”—or Jason’s Sudoku-inspired piece—lose too much meaning when removed from the context of the very process that brought it into existence? I personally enjoy Piano Phase specifically because of how intelligible the compositional process is, yet my roommate could care less what the process is because it shouldn’t matter when he’s listening to something, and to force it into the foreground of the music is a self-indulgent move on the part of the composer (and thus, he does not enjoy Piano Phase). 

Perhaps Jason is wrestling with these questions himself, and will explore them in the other movements of his Sudoku piece, but with the current movements I am not sure he has found the right balance between intellectual and visceral capital. But this is certainly a question we all have to think about as composers, of where the balance is between the cerebral and the emotional in our music.

Jason Treuting - Safeguards and Processes

I thoroughly enjoyed Jason Treuting’s talk and the various topics that he touched on provided much food for thought. In my reflection, I will briefly touch upon two main takeaways from his talk; being (a) aleatoric music and its safeguards and (b) the importance (or non-importance of) audience awareness of the creative process for their enjoyment of works.

Firstly, as a composer, Jason seemed to rather partial towards aleatoric music in which the performers play a crucial role in the “compositional” process. I found this exceptionally interesting because in my own works, I always feel the need to be as specific as possible in preparing my pieces and not to leave things to chance. Jason, on the other hand, sees the beauty in allowing the performers to interpret his own music and this ties in with how he values the idea of a “unique” performance that cannot be “recreated”. The way in which he celebrates such ephemerality is refreshing to me and gives me a fresh perspective on performance and compositions in general.

With that being said, Jason did talk about the inclusion of safeguards in such aleatoric works and he raised interesting points on the importance of knowing how you want your music to sound (his example on no quarter note triplets) which allows you to give targeted instructions to players. Basically, what I gathered from this is that as composers we need to know where the limits lie when we give some free reign to performers to interpret our music and we have to be able to translate our musical “desires” into clear instructions/ guidelines for them to follow. He also raised a great point on knowing and trusting your players and that was a highly useful reminder.

Secondly, in relation to his work “Nine Numbers”, when asked whether he thought it was important for his audience to know the precise way in which the music is being performed (i.e. the method in which the performers are interpreting the Sudoku), Jason mentioned that he thinks the knowledge of the process can “enhance” the listener’s experience but is not necessarily a vital element in “informing” the audience.

He also brought up an interesting museum analogy related to the aforementioned point in which the museum-goer’s experience is similarly not necessarily diminished when he or she does not read the label accompanying exhibit. To a certain extent, I do agree with his point and I do feel that at the end of the day, music is ultimately information that we receive through auditory means and that should be enough for our enjoyment of it. I agree with his point on how music should touch us on a visceral level first and foremost and sometimes the intellectuality of it might hinder our pure unadulterated enjoyment of something that is raw and beautiful.

As an aside, it was exciting to hear his work with Shara Nova, a composer that shared her works and experience with us last semester, as well. I thought it was wonderful to see how two such different composers could collaborate and create wonderful music.

Jason Treuting

Last Monday we received the visit of the composer and percussionist Jason Treuting, who shared with us some interesting thoughts about composition in general and also about his own work. There were two ideas that really spoke to me, his thoughts about aleatoric music, highly influenced by John Cage; and the idea of structure in composition. Both ideas meet in his compositional work, he tries to write pieces that present an overall determined structure, but that the actual performances of the pieces end up being completely different each time, through aleatoric means. An example of this is his piece for 2 percussionists based on Sudoku. In this case, is Sudoku what provides a mathematical structure that constructs the piece, but there are some parameters that can be changed in each performance, for example, the pitches employed. This piece is at the same time some sort of puzzle for the musicians to solve (I actually couldn’t stop thinking that it would make a great drinking game for musicians), and at the same time, the audience can follow the whole process of how the percussionist solve it. Regarding this, Jason mentioned something that sounded really interesting to me, he said something like that the actual music is achieved by somewhere in the middle of the piece, and what happens before is the presentation of the structure and a way to show the audience how we get to the actual music. I think this is an interesting perspective, but I do not completely agree with it. I absolutely think that all the elements presented at the beginning of the piece are part of it, and therefore, are definitely music. At the same time, I think he might not completely mean what he said and that it could just be a way to justify having, what could be to some people, not very interesting sounding moments on his piece. I really think there is no need for that kind of justifications, it is part of the structure, it is part of the piece, it is music.

What also leads me to think that he didn’t really mean what he said is the fact that he mentioned how influenced he was by John Cage and by the idea that “All sound is music” (So if all sound if music wouldn’t it be contradictory to say that some elements in his piece are not really music?...). I find this idea appealing and I loved how committed he seemed to it, it has clearly been an influential idea for the development of experimental music from the second half of the 20^th century to the present day. It is something that has pushed the limits of what music is or can be, although at the same time it can also lead to some sort of relativism that can be kind of dangerous, which is something that we may or may not have already experienced in contemporary music. I personally would say that, not “All sound is music”, but that “All sound can be music”. All sound present in an artistic context or setting is definitely music.