EMANATE / CRENELLATE:
Treatise on Composition
By Diamond Terrifier [aka Sam Hillmer]
Contents:
INTRODUCTION -
PLANS, PRIVACY, EVENTS, AND LATER -
RESPONSE, RESULTS AND REIMAGINING STRATEGIES -
COMPOSING WITH SOCIAL SPACE, BECOMING MEANS -
(Crucible of Means / On Locus and Utility / New and Ancient Praxis : The Music of Social Space / Acts of Radical Conviviality)
PERFORMANCE AS COMPOSITION -
(The Role of the Audience in Compositional Thought / On Performance / Models / Toward a Method of Performance as Composition)
INTRODUCTION
The text below describes how I see the state of musical composition and its surrounding current circumstances, and suggests some strategies for composers today. Composition is understood as any effort to organize sound in time and space for an audience, in person or virtually, by any actor. In this essay I focus on the practice of composers who create what I call ‘difficult listening experiences’. I refer to this interchangeably as difficult listening, outsider music, avant-garde music, and new music.
This essay accompanies my recent album of the same name released under my Diamond Terrifier moniker and recorded live in Milan. The compositions presented on the album EMANATE / CRENELATE were written largely in the process of public performance. I did not work on them in private. I performed them over and over again. While I wrote notes on pads of paper and napkins before and after performances, on trains to and from shows, and on airplanes, I never composed these pieces in private. What I am calling compositions here might more accurately be referred to as collections of motive impulses, stored in my mind and body over the course of roughly 100 performances, realized spontaneously for audiences. Many would call this improvisation. And while it could be understood as such, I consider it to be more generative and of greater utility to discuss this work as composition. This is because it is unclear whether composition can continue to exist in the way that it has existed historically as a musical and cultural category, given the curious situation of social, economic, environmental and creative precarity in which we find ourselves at present.
PLANS, PRIVACY, EVENTS, AND LATER
When information flows are pervading every space of the public discourse and imagination, simulation takes the central place in the emanation of the shared hallucination we call the ‘world’.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (25)
Compositions are plans, typically made in private by a musician, that suggest what other musicians - or themselves- might do at a given time, generally at a later time. These plans are often executed in public at an event.
Here we will consider whether the constitutive causes and conditions that surround and support composition are still tenable. Plans, privacy, later, the event - these are all embattled social, temporal, and ontological categories. Where does that leave composition?
Why plan? We face an imploding world where it is more important to react than to plan. Infrastructure, pillars of meaning making, and human bodies undergo attacks from within that often amount to their failure and dissolution. The world you plan for today may be gone tomorrow; places you value may effectively disappear, people you admire will be revealed as predatory psychopaths (or die), and more and more history will be forgotten or devalued. What defines your experience is your capacity for fluidity, intuition, uncertainty, and risk-taking. This is not to say that patience, repose, careful analysis and strategy are not useful, just that causes and conditions are such that they are often not practical options. There is no time to brood, pour over next steps, or consider magnificent architecture, for the ground on which it must sit may not be there when you are done, literally and figuratively speaking.
This is not an essay on environmental disaster. We will focus our attention on vanishing cultural ground. We will say more on the impossibility, or at least inadvisability, of planning below. For now, let’s turn our attention to notions of the private.
We live during a crisis in relation to private life. The construction ‘in private’ may no longer be uttered and mean what it has meant historically. Every moment of your life is potential for public display. If you are not displaying publicly, you are ruling out displaying publicly; therefore, you are either in public for all intents and purposes, or ruling out becoming public. In either case, you are defined by your visibility, either possible or explicit. An afternoon in your garden not posted is a wasted moment. When tears drip down your face, post it - post about your #mood, post things that articulate your status as a socio-economic being (even if untrue), post about your politics, post your child’s birth. Nothing is exempt; or, rather, that which is exempt is lost. If you've had an experience, post the receipt - otherwise it may not have happened. Our very existence is a function of that which can exist in public, dominantly as simulation; posts, media, and representation trump lived experience.
And yet there is still more that can be delivered from private life to public capture. Do you have a car? Perhaps you should be an Uber driver? Do you have a house, an apartment, a room, or even a living room? Lease it on AirBnB. Do you have a body? Why not start an Only Fans page to supplement your income?
Now that every passing moment is documented for public consumption, perhaps you've entered your body, home, or means of transportation into transactional dynamics predicated on public representation and evaluation of these assets, you can begin to do work about that situation. Start and monetize a Substack where you expound upon the realities of the gig economy. Develop a Patreon where people pay money to see you become public before everyone else gets to see. People can send you money via CashApp, Venmo, Paypal, and BitCoin in a gesture of support for your total eversion. Who is sending these supports your way? Other people who are playing the same game as you, of course. In fact, the act of support itself is also a means of going public; as follows, patronage and payments appear in TLs everywhere. And even when they don't, one can always post the receipt. Nothing is missed.
One does not keep lies, misdeeds, vices, or illness -predominantly mental illness - private as much as hide it from public view. Hiding is not privacy. Instead, it is an extremely heightened experience of being public - a visceral absence around which the public swims. Furthermore, if you are hiding something from the public, likely someone, or a group of people, is trying to find out and share publicly on your behalf. This will almost definitely be to your detriment. Somewhere the receipts are there, sitting on a server in a warehouse, a Google search, an Uber ride, a purchase, a prescription for antipsychotics - someone knows, or could know.
What, then, is privacy? What is private? And does composition depend upon that private time?
But you persist. You make a composition, a plan, in 'private'.
Processes vary.
Whether you write down notes, isolate frequencies, author explanatory texts, or create or gather recordings for future manipulation, everything is considered, every pitch deliberately chosen, every texture intentional, every rhythm defensible. Perhaps you are an aleatoricist or rely heavily on improvisation, in which case your work is more loosely realized. Nevertheless, you are as deliberate as possible. The historic context in which the work sits is thought through. Your work is at once an entirely new piece of art, a commentary on that which has come before, and a light glaring into the future which illuminates the course for those who will follow. You pace around your studio considering every dimension of the work in depth. You consider all manners of possible reception, analyzing the work from the point of view of your critics and defending your conclusions. You may author a long explanation of your conclusions. Later, the event comes: the performance, for the public, at which your conclusions will be evaluated. But when is that?
It is always already later. Later does not come so much as envelop. The public is consuming later in real time; as soon as something happens it is later, and proof of it's taking place is being consumed and evaluated by the public. The present is only the consumption and evaluation of what has just happened, the future is more of the same, the past immediately becomes later. The past - as in history or historicity - is decorative to these processes, but is not really present in one's work (insofar as history is no longer exalted or expected to be brought to bear on one’s present efforts as a matter of course in one’s work). Past, present, and future collapse into a single kinetic node of transaction, consumption, evaluation, and surveillance. To exist is a function of public consumption of your receipts from having existed and to consume, evaluate, and surveil the receipts of others.
But you've been holed up in your studio, crafting your plan for later. No one knows. You finish the architecture and more plans ensue. You book a show, engage other musicians and performers, rehearse, send out the instructions, talk with people about the details of execution over the phone or on Zoom, make changes. You may spend long nights with colleagues philosophizing and holding forth on aesthetics and meaning. Entire portions of your plans may get cut, day of. Everything must be perfect. The event arrives. Doors are at 8. At this point, one of two things happen.
Phones are either allowed or not, depending on the tenor of the event and the environment you wish to promote. If phones are not allowed, the event is effectively canceled; how will anyone, including the people who are present, know that it really happened? As each passing moment becomes later, you squander the opportunity to prove that you exist. No one knows this happened, and those who were there will forget with nothing to scroll through later to verify it's having taken place. Or! Phones are allowed, in which case, people exit. They have to tell people where they are, and they have to find out about where they are not; there are other concerts, shows, events, parties going on they elected not to go to. They are becoming later too and it all must be evaluated. Furthermore, babies are being born, predators are being shamed and toppled, Biden is caught drooling into Kamala's soup, there is shopping to do, and everyone needs to find out who might be 'down to fuck' later. All of this and more must be attended to, considered, and evaluated by your public. Your plan does not compete.
The crisis in relation to private time is causally bound up with a crisis in relation to time in general. Trapped in permanent later, we no longer deliver from the recesses of private life for public social experience. We are always already there. This implodes categories of time and evacuates private and public life of meaningful distinction. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, it is already happening later on full display.
Back to your concert.
Sure, it happened - you were there, everyone came, it looked like a concert, and the ghost of it's happening hangs around the world like a scarecrow in an open field. You post documentation in its entirety on your YouTube channel, or perhaps you are ‘trending’ and it gets shared by a media platform, in which case it goes live at noon the next day, and by three it's buried by a myriad of other receipts from experiences which have become later too. Ultimately, it was a low leverage move.
But surely some people got it. There are still people in the world capable of putting their phones away and paying attention. Critics from multiple periodicals came and sat in front. You watched them - they were paying attention. Professors - maybe your professors, or perhaps your fellow professors - were there as well. They formed refined and in-depth opinions about your work which they shared with you over drinks during the evening's conclusion. Representatives of foundations considering funding later efforts of yours came too; hopefully they paid meticulous attention to your conclusions. But here, again, you face an imploding world.
What are historically the pillars of meaning making crumble all around you at increasing velocities. Even the most profound sources of news media are dominated by the click or by advertising. Only the spectacular can survive. The spectacle is that which is sublime. It must be harnessed and marshaled by media outlets who neither create these phenomena nor have much sway in guiding them. No loan critic can cut against that current to leverage visibility for a counternarrative or anything less spectacular. The media only reacts. Meanwhile, the phalanx of professors who attended your event work on the factory floors of meaning making, powered by adjuncts outpaced in socioeconomic space by baristas and bartenders (no shade at baristas and bartenders). As academia's outcomes diminish in profundity, relevance, and visibility, there will be enough resources to maintain the salaries of those with tenure (a waining custom) until death. The rest of the operation will be helmed by scholars several hundred thousand dollars in debt working for less than the income of the average first year public school teacher in your city (no shade at public school teachers) but without job security or benefits. And the one-percenters powering the foundations whose approval you court have bigger fish to fry.
You cannot plan for a vanishing world. Privacy eludes you. Later permeates. Events are nodes of transaction for experiences people aren't having. Writers, academics, and philanthropists are embroiled in their amygdala, engaged by fight or flight, because they know better than anyone that this cannot last.
The constitutive processes of compositional practice sequester the compositional actor - you - in an imagined private space of planning and production. It's cozy, but it’s not actionable.
The text above is dystopian, grim, cynical, and pessimistic. It’s a take on social, cultural, and economic space that paints a bleak picture of the present and attempts to place musical composition - a discipline that is at least 1200 years old by Western standards (and much older if you cast a wider net) - in its midst. I write hyperbolically; things may not be this bad. Specifically in relation to performance, the description above addresses only the most defiled performance settings. Performance holds incredible potential with regards to the prospects of composition, about which more is said below. Additionally, for the record, at present there are successful compositional enterprises in aesthetic, cultural, social, and economic terms. There is still some excellent music journalism being written. There are galaxy-brained professors doing mind-blowing work. There are committed and ethical foundations whose heroic altruism furnishes significant support for the arts and for artists. All is not lost.
But if everything I describe above is not 100% true all of the time, certainly all of it is true some of the time, and more and more so, as later continues to arrive.
How does one respond under such circumstances?
RESPONSE, RESULTS AND REIMAGINING STRATEGIES
Before considering how we ought to respond, let’s look at how we are responding.
Optimists will point to the recent successes of experimental music stemming from EDM and club-based practice. They may cite bands whose composed efforts rival those of institutional composition. They could mention indie classical and a resurgence of jazz practitioners with a penchant for the abstract as recent reactions to the present that find success. If one can content themselves with these expressions, oft-diluted and sanitized emanations of more challenging works from the second half of the last century, then it stands to reason that they may protest my assertions. While more agreeable versions of past work will survive for the time being (albeit with diminished stature relative to preceding efforts), what is impossible to imagine are new incarnations of music’s great disruptors. Certainly someone is carrying the torch of late minimalism, receiving commissions, accolades, advances on record deals and so on, but musical and cultural actors such as Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Alice Coltrane, The Boredoms, Xenakis, Genesis Breyer P. Orridge, or collectives such as the AACM, Fluxus, or the Darmstadt School will not be born anew at that scale of visibility and influence under present circumstances.
Here I echo what Mark Fisher has called the “slow cancellation of the future”:
The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, The Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the Gold Rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly. (Fisher)
Fisher does not restrict his gaze to that of the outsider musical practitioner, but rather wages the same critique within the sphere of pop; nevertheless, the congruence is obvious and suggests that the short fall of aspirants to attain the gravity that past cultural works assumed is not relegated to the territory of the outsider musical practitioner, but rather paradigmatic and a sign of our times. With that in mind, we will train our focus on the practice of difficult listening.
This failure in attainment of stature is relatable to contemporary modes of dissemination and consumption of cultural products. It also highlights how we as outsider musical practitioners respond to our epoch.
At present, we find communities of outsider musical practice’s strategic predilection bound up in processes of delinking from one another. Being ‘siloed’ in cultural space has long been regarded as undesirable within dominant enclaves of creative practice, yet today we find outsider musical communities in hot pursuit of that exact outcome. Whatever you do, there are presenters, venues, emerging artist residencies, MFA programs, foundations, and festivals devoted ONLY to that. Success in any lane of outsider musical practice is defined by access to these entities; many of the most sought after are those who have delinked from the general body of musical flow with the greatest austerity. Visibility in general shared public time via disruption of consumerist expectation is swapped for refined and rarefied specificity. Without the scepter of the disruptive available to - or even sought after by - avant-gardists, communities exploring this practice become akin to foodies who enjoy acutely funky natural wine and stinky cheese, more than to their socio-cultural predecessors.
The siloing of outsider communities of musical practice into hyper-specific affinity groups for the appreciation of individuated forms, the abandonment of broader social and cultural disruption as a means of propagating the work of outsider musicians, delinking from one another in the broader splay of cultural alterity and social space writ large - the net effect of these processes - though undeniably productive of some moments of cultural achievement - is one of atomization, marginalization, and alienation in broader society for outsider cultural actors. It seems we have given up on a general audience for the weird - one that would no doubt be rife with contradiction and internal disagreements - and instead chosen a plethora of micro-audiences, each devoted to a particular cultural and musical expression and cleansed of divergent views on music and culture. The aim becomes maximum concord, where one is rarely confronted with conclusions that challenge their worldviews (which are a predicate for belonging to the affinity group in the first place). This modality of cultural production stands in exact contradistinction to the history and historicity of avant-gardism, outsideness, and otherness writ large. Rather than harnessing the disruptive potential of alterity as a means of provoking thought, reflection, and discourse, it seeks to eliminate alterity by continually producing an experience of normativity at smaller and smaller scales. But this is a con, as it is at once productive of an illusory experience of normative dominance while at the same time causing one’s actual erasure from social and cultural space.
The end result is an accelerating diminution of impact on the social life of people as a function of exposure to our musical and cultural work. If you believe that difficult aesthetics have a role to play in the world, then this can only be bad. Visibility and reach can easily be written off as the goals of narcissists and careerists, but this is a mistake. If you are reading this article and are a practitioner of the musically weird, at some point in your life, someone reached you. A musical expression you were not expecting to encounter came before you and it changed your life. When we retreat into enclosures, we choose to give up on reaching out. This is an understandable reaction to present day social realities but it is unacceptable and untenable in the long run. It is incumbent upon avant-gardists to constantly catapult the outcomes of our work into territories beyond our immediate communities, wherein we act as foreigners, wherein we are abject, wherein we recruit. Only there, in the discomfort of disruption, do we experience the conditions necessary to build and rejoin our communities as well as harness the true utility of our work.
To get there, or to get back there, we must examine our means of production, our modalities of presentation, our strategies for representation, and our habits of assembly. To uncoil the effects of decades of siloing, a renewed commitment to conviviality between the enclaves of outsider musical practice, between us and the world, and between us and our tools is required.
How do we navigate a world rife with crisis in relationship to private and public space, geopolitical crisis, economic crisis, ontological crisis, and social disaster? As I have repeatedly illustrated, neither the terrain nor the vehicles available to you support you. Indeed ‘you’ yourself may endure heightened discontinuity of psychic experience as a function of these surroundings. You may not be schizophrenic, but the situation is. What should you do?
The fundamental question is ontological, where ‘being’ is defined as being present, aware, and capable of acting. How can you be in this world, how can you compose, how can you manifest? Every person, group, or expression is consolidated by affinity and evaluated on a scale of likeability; subsequently, difference and disruption are increasingly eliminated from cultural experience. Where and how does the outsider stand in the broader cultural schema when this is the case? How can we respond to our circumstance?
These are my suggestions:
Compose with social space, not in it; become means!
Adopt performance as a primary mode of composition.
COMPOSING WITH SOCIAL SPACE, BECOMING MEANS
(Crucible of Means / On Locus and Utility / New and Ancient Praxis : The Music of Social Space / Acts of Radical Conviviality)
The soloist is a weapon, weapons when they’re fired aren’t meant to be preserved... Poets aren’t meant to survive, poets are servants of poetry. And that kind of individuation isn’t meant to survive, and the way we know that’s true is by how crazy the average poet is. The poet is an unsustainable form of individual subjectivity. More generally the artist is that…They’re not meant to survive. But they’re instruments. In other words, they’re not an end in themselves, they’re a means.
Fred Moten, from his 2017 lecture “Manic Depression: A Poetics of Hesitant Sociology”
Crucible of Means -
The dominant product in cultural and economic space at present is means. Here we refer to means in the manner that Marx did when referencing means of production. However, at present, there are more means than there are products. Production delivers means, which in turn deliver more means, and so on. This finds expression in our work as follows:
A composition is not complete until it is recorded. A recording is not complete until you have posted the stems and they have been exported and reconfigured for new audiences by other actors. A performance is not complete unless it is accompanied by an ‘immersive environment’ in which it may be experienced, which does not work unless it is documented voraciously by guests, which in turn does not matter until these new media assets are consumed, reposted, evaluated, liked, attacked online, and so on. Even after this process is complete, our efforts are mined for data about our whereabouts and predilections by corporations who then sell this data to advertising entities that seek to steer our habits of consumption in the future. And then, repeat…
The painful point is that means require raw material to propagate themselves. At present there is a popular mantra: “If a product is free, you are the product”. But I disagree. You are not the product because there isn't a product - you are the fuel. Your work propagates the cascade of processes described above - experience, documentation, extraction, surveillance, and manipulation. As such, you burn up and out in a crucible constructed only of means.
On Locus and Utility -
This reality cannot be boycotted. Your absence from the supply chain of means is not experienced as disruption; instead, you experience non-existence whilst the juggernaut of means and consumption churns without you. You are not missed. The challenge is to apprehend and understand this system of cultural production and locate your relation to it in a manner that is of little value to it but of some value to you and to your peers, or at least that is not actively doing you harm. Ideally, you would extract value and return nothing.
For creators of music, especially outsider musical forms, the work of considering your cultural locus regarding the machinations of hyper-capitalist means and capture ought to be inherently compositional in nature. It is not the arts administration that surrounds your completed efforts; it is the effort, it is the work, and must therefore be calculated as part of the compositional process along with note choice, rhythmic and textural vocabulary, schematics, improvisation, and performance practice.
If the act of composition is intertwined with the meaning-making dimension of musical organization, then failure to include this calculus in your practice forgoes the aspects of audience experience dominantly responsible for what your work may come to mean at present. For this reason, social space can no longer be considered the theater wherein your work finds expression; rather, the materiality of social space must be incorporated into and acted upon by the processes you employ to produce work. In this way, social space transmutes from theater to laboratory, shifting from the space culture happens in to the material music happens to.
When, as composers, we consider locus in this way and make specific arrangements in social space accordingly, we are composing with social space and materiality. Geographic place, physical space, demographics, decoration, promotion, event staff - these and other factors either contribute to or detract from the presentation of composition. If these factors are ignored, no one will stop you from booking a performance at a venue and hoping for a successful event. However, failing to engage critically and deliberately with factors like those listed above leaves a formidable amount of potential for meaning making on the proverbial table.
Furthermore, addressing the phalanx of means and devices one encounters within their surroundings through compositional practice gestures toward becoming means. This is true insofar as the stake you take in these arrangements, historically considered to be extramusical, is what makes you useful to those involved. It is, of course, of utility to produce aesthetic musical objects for consideration by audiences, but to become involved not just with what is presented but how it is presented is to become the ally of everyone involved in the production as well as every audience member.
The mandate that calculus with regards to locus in social space be incorporated into compositional practice and integrated with other compositional strategies will be anathema to many. However, were this credo embodied by musicians en masse, it would not be the first time that supposedly extra musical elements or processes and items ancillary to musical production were absorbed by the general musical compositional work of an era. While a holistic conception of aesthetic, musico-social, and/or cosmological space may only be atavistically instantiated by musicians and composers in musical practice, it is anything but new.
New and Ancient Praxis: The Music of Social Space -
The 20th century saw the incorporation of silence, noise sounds, chance operations, aleatory, serialism, stochastic procedures, and a myriad other process-based strategies incorporated into normative compositional flow. Additionally, computers, turntables, CD Players and later CDJs, as well as musical artifacts themselves, became common constitutive components in a broad array of compositional efforts across many enclaves of music-making. If you are reading this essay, this is likely review. The territorializing of the amusical as musical is common practice. In fact, all items and processes ultimately purposed toward musical ends began without musical function. It is the impulse toward music that identifies an object or process and imbues it with musicality. The advents of the 20th century described above are often characterized as standing in contradistinction to prior musical efforts when in fact these evolutions are the continuation of the ancient human project of making the world musical and understanding the world in terms of music.
More pertinent to the project at hand than the advents of the 20th century are musical systems that specifically understand music as a function of, instantiation of, and active participant in conceptions of the cosmic, social, ontological, and bodily dimensions of phenomena. These systems find their origins in our distant past:
The Pythagorean Alexander of Aetolia expounds upon the position of the planets and their relation to the advent of the lyre: “'The seven spheres give the seven sounds of the lyre and produce a harmony (that is to say, an octave), because of the intervals which separate them from one another.” (Godwin)
A similar sentiment is found in the Confucius compiled Book of Rites (5th C. BC):
Music has its origin from heaven; ceremonies take their form from the appearances of earth. If the imitation of those appearances were carried to excess, confusion (of ceremonies) would appear; if the framing of music were carried to excess, it would be too vehement. Let there be an intelligent understanding of the nature and interaction of (heaven and earth), and there will be the ability to [practice] well both ceremonies and music. (Confucius)
Perhaps the most far-reaching example of musico-social organization in compositional practice comes to us from the oldest known living civilization - that of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia (for want of a better term) who are traceable as having existed 50,000 years into the past. Here I am referring to the tradition of 'song lines' in Aboriginal cultural and social life. Anna Voight and Nevill Drury describe the musical and social practice thus in their book Wisdom from the Earth: the Living Legacy of the Aboriginal Dreamtime:
Each song in a cycle, which signifies an action of an ancestral being in a specific place, is owned and is the responsibility of an aboriginal person who is the custodian of the dreaming of that place. Each custodian has been taught the procedures of her or his duty of care to the land, and they expect that all other Aboriginal custodians of a Dreaming track would similarly carry out their roles - for a Dreaming track, or song line, connects all those who share in this Dreaming and the knowledge it contains. (Voight and Drury)
Unrelated though similar, the use of Gregorian Chant in the execution of canonical hours (also referred to as the divine office or the liturgy of hours) structures the location, schedule, and spiritual practice of monks. The canonical hours have been maintained widely in monastic settings for almost two millennia and are still observed today in some monasteries.
The song lines of the Aboriginal Australian as well as the canonical hours of the Christian Church both surpass a mere overarching commitment to the social; they actually direct the flow of physical bodies in space and time as a function of metaphysical work pertaining to the spiritual life of individuals and communities. These practices organize socially and cosmically as much as they do musically.
In the above excerpts, radically heterogenous cultural actors and traditions of music-making are shown to engage cosmic, social, ontological, and bodily phenomena as a function of expressly musical work.
Acts of Radical Conviviality -
My intention here is not to posit a Chomskian musical mono-genesis theory, nor to suggest that anyone should run out and get a didgeridoo, study ancient Chinese music theory, or Gregorian chant, let alone become a neo-Pythagorean! This kind of cultural window shopping is often facile and bypassing, a means of avoiding one’s own cultural problems by dint of an escape into the exotic. Instead, I seek only to highlight the historicity of music-making involved with what we presently look upon as extra musical consideration and organization. From the cosmic to the ordering of human affairs on Earth, ancient musicians and traditions have engaged the territories of meaning and phenomena we call social.
Today we work alone. The general body of music makers busts into genres, which are then broken into splinter groups, often with fractious dynamics within each group, giving rise to more, smaller groups, and so on. Generally, each musical enclosure has no particular relationship to the world or responsibility to it. There are imperatives but not traditions. There is zeitgeist but not historicity. There is horizontal peer logic without a vertical tension produced by lasting ideals to check it. As such, we are adrift. This is largely because we have no utility to people outside of our group, which is true as a function of our divorce from social and cosmic space and because we are siloed into tiny affinity groups which concern themselves only with their internal goings-on.
Many segments of human society have made transitions of mental model qua music over the last two millennia, from the musician as custodian of the universe, social space, and sensorium to isolated individuated cultural actors firing off tracks on Soundcloud in their bedroom and hoping for the best. But here we are. A way out is to embody a compositional practice of radical integration between music and our surroundings, or music constituting one’s surroundings; in other words, composing with social space.
To compose with social space inverts the relationship of the actor and the acted upon between means and artist respectively. To compose with social space is to become means and for your work to become means. It is to be of utility and to commit to being of utility. Neoliberal capitalist economies of desire and consumption metabolize products too quickly. Only means survive. By fastening the kinetic points of your practice to the sticky threads of social space, you become a network of flow for diverse actors. Furthermore, by assuming structural import in the manifesting of performance ritual and assembly as an integral component of your compositional work, you mitigate the injuriousness of always being the raw material acted upon by other means and propagated by other actors.
In a radical act of conviviality, compose with social space and materiality. Bring the social and techno-social machinery that engulfs you under your purview. Subordinate it at the hands of your highest philosophic, aesthetic, musical, social, and cosmic intention. ‘You’ may not survive in your present form. As Fred Moten reminds us, the artist “is an unsustainable form of individual subjectivity. They’re not meant to survive.” (Moten) But many of us, and many communities, already aren’t surviving. Even if we survive economically, the siloing, alienation, and fractiousness, the diminution of impact our work experiences, the end of disruption - it hastens a kind of death of what we do. To steer away from this doom, we must first consider our relationship to the world and social space and then compose there.
PERFORMANCE AS COMPOSITION:
(The Role of the Audience in Compositional Thought / On Performance / Models / Toward a Method of Performance as Composition
Contemporary subjects are moving from a paradigm of relationality…to an intramodal ontology, a paradigm of imbrication, cohabitation, and coextension wherein the limits of the subject cannot be assumed.
Deborah Kapchan, from "The Aesthetics of Proximity: A Phenomenology of the Auditory Sublime"
The Role of the Audience in Compositional Thought -
The music of the earth, the music of the sun and the stars, the music of your self vibrating - yes, you are all music too, you’re all instruments.
Sun Ra
In 2009 the band I play in, ZS, was preparing a new album worth of material. There were performances coming up and we were readying the material for public presentation. After an early performance of that material, I learned something important about composition and performance.
The centerpiece of our set was a blistering and relentless 21 minute monolith of a composition. The whole affair was meticulously choreographed. The first half of the piece was a longform drone, a noisy wall of sound that descended from the upper octaves to a deep but still audible range. On a drum cue, we snapped out of it and performed the second half of the piece, which consisted of a series of interlocking and rhythmically counterintuitive atonal riffs. These terraced toward a particularly triumphant finish in terms of complexity; after a lengthy riff, we were done.
To inaugurate the new material and prepare to record, we booked and played a short Northeast tour which terminated with a return show in New York, where we performed the work for the first time for friends and fans in our hometown. We executed the work in the manner described above throughout that tour and at the final show in New York, but something about it wasn’t right. We agreed that the piece did not work as an experience. At the end of the New York show in a discussion backstage, we realized that the problem with the piece was that it had been assembled backwards. The drone intro did not make the riff portion feel inevitable, and the riffs felt anticlimactic after the drones. In subsequent performances we reversed the order of these sections and the issue was resolved. The drama of the music felt intact and relatable; the experience now worked for us and for our audiences. This seemed to be more than just a matter of personal taste, but rather something that was somehow true; audience reception consistently confirmed that throughout the three years we spent performing the piece.
What we learned was not that the drone should follow the complex riff and not the other way round; rather, we realized the incredibly important role the audience plays in the formation of compositional thought. Conceptually, our idea made sense, the work was good, the performance was masterful. What we didn’t know was that it wouldn’t work for an audience. On that first tour, it was the presence of the audience that made this realization possible. After repeatedly asking people to join us on a specific journey, we picked up from the audience that the piece wasn’t that compelling and that they weren’t having a meaningful time.
In 2012, a later iteration of the band found itself in the same situation. We had developed a collection of material that was ready for the road. This time, however, our compositional conclusions were less meticulously realized. Instead, we sought to make room in advance for the lessons from the audience we knew to expect. Rather than complete our work and then present it, we chose to bring the compositions to a defensible state of development and then begin sharing. In this way, we could incorporate audience feedback into the development of the finished compositions. The sections were not finite and agreed upon, but rather elastic, relying on a meshwork of cues and body language to move from one to another. We performed the work well over 100 times before recording. By the time we recorded, the pieces had congealed into repeatable compositions that we performed with a degree of consistency. We made the recording, the record came out, and we toured extensively behind it.
What we noticed, however, was that the interaction with each other and with audiences continued to change the work. Gradually, interstitial and transitional sections of the music assumed greater magnitude, passing gestures became entire sections, and new vocabularies for expounding upon the work entered in. The initial compositional ideas we took on the road back in 2012, in 2016, faded to a detail of something we’d never imagined creating. It was as if performance itself was generative of music, namely music of a different sort from what we had written. This new music, born of performance, relied less on our prior compositional efforts but continued to thrive along the lines of its own logic in performance.
One night in a hotel room after a show in Boston, I mused with my friend and bandmate, guitarist and composer Patrick Higgins, that what had emerged around our compositional ideas was a style in execution at the level of the ensemble, a kind of grammar we’d developed tacitly as a group, that was particular to the task of playing this music, and yet separate from it - essentially, it was its own thing. It seemed to us that the particular modality in execution we had arrived at through a composite of our individual (and highly personal) styles in playing was what was surfacing as the main event of our set rather than the compositional ideas that had driven us to perform sets in the first place. Could a body of musical work consist only of that grammar, those semantics, that style? I wondered aloud with Patrick in that hotel. We considered a musical and performative modality that takes as its starting point our own personal modalities of execution, which in turn, at the level of the composite, constitute the modality in question. Put differently, the question became: Can style, the social space, and the materiality of performance function as compositional method and material?
During the subsequent five years, the band would pursue an answer to that question.
What resulted from our forays into compositional and performative practice were an array of both individual and group haecceities and quiddities. Each musician circumscribed a territory of sonic, musical, and aesthetic material that was theirs. This seemed to increase in focus and not become more diffuse as time drew on, both at the level of the individual and the ensemble. We will share our outcomes in the form of a release shortly, but for the purposes of this essay, this is a good time to stop telling this story. What’s more important than our outcomes are the questions this method begs. Principle among them: can performance be a means of composition?
On Performance -
Yet the site where sound touches flesh - the body - becomes a magnet for memories, an assembly of cells, of selves imagining themselves a unity, an author.
Deborah Kapchan, from Theorizing Sound Writing
Performance is hectic. It is a meshwork of the most quotidian action, transcendental ritual, frivolity, games, and other modalities. Tasks are performed, identity is performed, social machination is performed, compositions are performed alongside elements of improvisation. Performativity is celebrated and also despised, contrived and embodied. It’s never not happening, and it’s never not been happening. Performance is legion.
It is important to note that at performances, everyone is performing. At musical performances, musicians are united ontologically with the audience in performance. Musicians perform compositions and improvisation while the audience perform acts of social identification. Everyone is vulnerable, bound up in an interdependent web of performativity. We call these webs ‘events’. Perhaps there is something about this fascia called performance or these web structures called events that composers can act with and upon in gestures of becoming and authorship that include both musical actors and audience.
Showing up to an event is a generative act. Listening is a generative act. The inter and intrapersonal work that transpires at performances on the part of the audience are acts of meaning, mapmaking, interpretation, explication, identification (social and otherwise), and function as the record of the event having happened; it is being recorded psychically and somatically via the sensoriums of those who went. The generative work of audiencehood, or even bystander-hood (as in the case of street performance), is of profound importance to the meaning of performance and composition; they are as much productive of the work being presented as the act of composing it.
But what is performance?
Richard Schechner takes a formidable swing at answering that question. Schechner scaffolds to an understanding of performance using a four part lens that includes “being, doing, showing doing, and showing showing doing”, wherein life itself, basic tasks, performance, and performance theory correspond respectively to those four concepts (Schechner). In Schechner's epistemic effort, performance, when understood as ‘showing doing’, constitutes a continuum that encompasses a range of activities inclusive of the most banal of tasks, as well as that which we regard as performance in art, sport, or religion. He expounds upon this through ‘fan’ and ‘web’ models which detail what can comprise performance. Each model situates a variety of modalities of performance in relation to one another. In the case of the fan, as a continuum, and in the case of the web, as an interconnected array of kinetic nodes, both are capable of informing one another’s manifestation in performance. While both models are useful, we will concern ourselves with the web.
Schechner’s web unites ancient performance practice from throughout the world with contemporary performance practice, shamanism, other healing modalities, ‘play and crisis behavior’, everyday tasks, and study. This all exists within the rubric of performance. The web is important for our work as it indexes much of what may be at issue at any performance. Namely, it specifically renders performance as pan-historic and articulates connectivity between these nodes of performative work such that all can be accessed in any performance setting. This view of performance underscores its gravity in cultural production and presentation and makes the case that composers ought to address performance forthrightly as importantly constitutive of their practice rather than as a formality engaged once composing is complete. It is largely through performance that compositions become meaningful. Therefore, a strong consideration of and critical engagement with performance is of vital import to composers and to composition.
Two Models
It is generally taken for granted that finished compositions are to be presented before audiences for reception. However, in the new, imploded, hyper-generative, hyper-interconnected, and interdependent social spaces of our present, no such context can be assumed. It is not enough to presume that “if you build it they will come”; rather, one must ask “if they come, what will we build?” The people who comprise audiences are embroiled in their own processes of building at every moment. The question that composers must therefore answer is: How am I participating in building things with people? The moment when that inquiry activates materially with people in social space is within the moment of performance. There are models that, wittingly or unwittingly, harness this potential - they are worth our consideration.
The Tour
The alarm goes off at 6AM. Call is in the lobby of the hotel at 7. Perhaps there is breakfast, perhaps not - either way, you have to be on the road by 8. Whether by car, bus, train, plane, or boat, you will spend the day in transit negotiating a series of unimportant logistical necessities, interfacing with various officials, and making the following case: “I am a musician on tour”. In a perfect world, you are at the hotel in the next town by 3PM, where you can shower, change, and briefly feel like a regular person again. Soundcheck is at 5 and dinner at 7. By the time you return to the venue, the opening acts are playing. You use the first of your drink tickets. You hide in the green room. You smoke in front of the venue or walk around the block. You meet people, and then meet even more people. You explain the same things you did the night before and tell the same stories. You figure out who you and all these people know in common. You follow each other on Instagram.
Now it’s 10PM and you step on stage, finally, to do the one thing you are actually there to do. Your mood is elevated, but at the same time you are exhausted and bored. You hope this music changes people’s lives; simultaneously, you want it to be over so you can finally walk around alone, or tie it on with strangers, or get in bed and get Wifi and try to act like life is normal. No matter what, you are going to bring what you’ve come to do with ferocity and focused intensity and not let these people up for air until you say “thank you and good night” because what else would you do? Having traveled all this way to do this, how could you allow it to be anything other than sublime?
In the opening paragraphs of this section I discuss learning experiences about composition stemming from time I spent on the road with an ensemble that I am a part of. Touring is a relatively ordinary practice for musicians and ensembles to engage in, but is not discussed as a compositional strategy. And yet touring possesses a number of attributes that are deeply beneficial to compositional process and to compositions.
When musicians, ensembles, or composers arrange a tour, they engage in heightened dialogue with communities of musical practice from diverse settings; subsequently, they experience high volumes of place, audience, and time. Experience from the road can include culture shock, accolades, rejection, important meetings of both congruent and divergent perspectives, culinary adventure and deprivation, a wide range of logistical difficulties and/or triumphs, and the heights of ecstatic frivolity. This is balanced with extreme lows, the depths of loneliness, and the fallout from bad habits you deem necessary in the face of extraordinary demands road time places on the individual. Touring is not without drawbacks. Certainly it is one of the more disruptive things a person can do in their life, especially when touring for periods of a month or more. However, touring, for better or for worse, brings out in the individual musical subject a suppleness and an openness to try novel things. The rapid succession of performance experiences opens up an ensemble to risk-taking, changing things from night to night, an attitude of “why not?” This space of social, cognitive, and musical-aesthetic plasticity is of extreme value to those composing. The performance doesn’t have to be perfect because you are going to do it all again tomorrow anyway. Because it doesn’t have to be perfect, you have space to experiment - the new can be discovered, explored, unraveled. This discovery space directly aids composition.
The Rave
A rave is an electronic dance music event that features performances by DJs and producers with occasional live acts from musicians using acoustic means of sound generation. Raves tend to be long - 6 hours is considered a minimum, while 8 to 12 hours is normal. The longest rave I’ve hosted was 36 hours long. The music played at raves includes a wide array of electronic dance music styles too numerous to name here; attempting to do so would only lead to embarrassing omissions of important musical styles that contribute formidably to rave culture. Once a rave starts, there is no silence until it is over, unless by mistake (for the most part). Heightened attention is paid to decor; rave aesthetics are generally preoccupied with dystopian, futuristic, and industrial imagery and environments, though some border on hippie aesthetics, and others approach the aesthetic precision and antiseptic quality associated with gallery practice in the fine arts world. For the most part, decoration and other manipulations of physical space aim to engender a sealed-in quality. A good rave becomes a crucible in which the collective energy of the artists and attendees accumulates over the span of the event. Producers of raves by and large have propagated what Hakim Bey dubbed Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) - ephemeral spaces that pop up and exist for a time, wherein formal structures of control are abandoned before disappearing as quickly as they had emerged. Hakim Bey notes:
Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols...Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.
― Hakim Bey
“Changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols” effectively summarizes the work of those who produce and participate in raves. The manner in which the elements converge - the sealed-off environment, unending trance-inducing music, decorative aesthetic, not to mention the likely presence of psychotropic agents - prime the audience and artists alike for an in-depth engagement with the resulting environment. A good rave becomes a temporary community. It is long enough to rely on long-term memory when harkening back to its beginning, the subsequent journey experienced at the level of this new community, and the final dissolution at each party's conclusion.
Raves are at issue in this article due to the heightened engagement with place, community, and physical environs achieved by presenters, audience, and musicians alike. In our discussion of composing with social space we have said that "When, as composers, we consider locus in this way and make specific arrangements in social space accordingly, we are composing with social space and materiality." Also above, as part of our discussion surrounding the generative nature of audience-hood, we’ve said that “The inter and intrapersonal work that transpires at performances on the part of the audience are acts of meaning, mapmaking, interpretation, explication, identification (social and otherwise), and function as the record of the event having happened; it is being recorded psychically and somatically via the sensoriums of those who went." We find formidable expressions of these ideas at the rave. Let us take a look at the role of the composer of dance music tracks or DJ sets - the producer, or the DJ (to use the native nomenclature) - and consider how rave performances function as composition.
Aside from the occasional live performance, performers at raves generally fall into two categories: producers and DJs. A producer is a composer of dance music. A DJ plays dance music tracks as part of DJ sets. Many producers are also DJs; fewer DJs are producers. A rave lineup consists of one or more DJs or producers, or DJ/producers. Dominantly the music played at raves is played via media devices, mainly CDJs and Turntables, wherein two or more are in use at any time and a mixer is used to transition between the different tracks or to allow a DJ to play two or more tracks simultaneously. Another modality at issue during rave performances are live hardware sets where producers work directly with electronic instruments such as synthesizers, drum machines, or samplers to produce a live set of dance or electronic music. We will focus on the role of the DJ when the DJ is also a producer, which is often.
An important fact about tracks is that they are made to intentionally dovetail into other tracks in the context of DJ sets and that the frequencies within each track can be manipulated using the EQ function on the mixer. In other words, the tracks are not quite done when a producer is finished creating them. The finished product exists only within the context of sets, wherein the tracks are manipulated in terms of frequency and aesthetic, changed formally through loop functions, and made to overlap with multiple other tracks, the identity of which the producer could not possibly be aware of at the time of composition. How exactly these manipulations of tracks and overlapping bricolage unfold is dependent upon the predilection of the DJ/producer as well as audience feedback. Any DJ worth their salt reads the room and makes a set grow and change in accordance with the energy in the room. By noticing how the audience is responding to a set, the DJ shapes what happens next to aid in the journey of the temporary community that has converged before handing it off to the next performer. Furthermore, a track post-release embarks on a rhizomatic journey wherein it will be changed, remixed, looped, distorted, and effected by the producer who created the track in the context of their own DJ sets, but also by many DJs who contextualize and recontextualize said track infinitely for as long as there is interest in the track. What this means is that the compositional method of the producer is to organize sound in time - much like all composers - but to also create something that becomes both cause and condition for further creation, all while utilizing the track that has been created as a canvas. Producers will also provide stems from the session wherein the track was generated for reconfiguring by other producers. For producers, composition is not a matter of being definitive, but rather a matter of inquiry. What can happen with these sounds in the world with producers, DJs, and audiences if I collect these sounds and share them in this form?
Importantly, producers in their DJ sets seldom play only their own tracks. In addition to sharing their work - which they manipulate and recontextualize anew for each set - producers function as amplification for other producers. Most DJ/producers perform at raves but also organize their own events. Many have a moniker for a recurring night they host in addition to their DJ practice. Many more also run record labels, internet radio stations, booking agencies, and lifestyle brands. Composing with social space, becoming means, utilizing the instance of performance as compositional vehicle - DJ/producers working within and with rave culture manifest these strategies with great profundity.
The tour and the rave present cultural, musical, and performative modalities with properties that lend themselves to composition in performance. It is important to highlight these, as it is one thing to declare that composers ought to compose in performance, and yet another to demonstrate that this is something that actually already happens readily in settings that are quite ordinary. By working from these models, we can imagine ways of bringing performance in composition into compositional practice writ large.
Toward a Method of Performance as Composition -
Let us review.
We live in uncertain times, wherein public and private life - as well as things like events and plans - have become unreliable categories of experience. Humans live in permanent “later”. Simulation takes the place of life itself. One's purpose is to be evaluated and surveilled, and to surveil and evaluate others. These conditions promote fractious dynamics within and between groups of people. Practitioners of difficult listening find themselves siloed into affinity groups, out of dialogue with one another, and surrounded by cultural economies that metabolize the outcomes of their work with extreme speed. All of the above has a destabilizing effect on the life and work of composers of every type and from every walk of musical practice.
In light of all of this, performance holds astonishing potential for composers and composition when it is harnessed as a compositional strategy. In the models of the tour and the rave, we have seen that potential realized. However, in order to bring about a broader adoption of this strategy, it is necessary to distill its essential components and present those clearly as a possible method.
Performance as Composition: 8 Points -
Composing with social space and materiality, not in it
Performance as composition begins by regarding all of your social and material circumstances as compositional fodder. Nothing about the setting wherein you will ultimately perform is taken for granted - it is all created by you, composed. Where, how, why, at whose cost, and at whose benefit a compositional expression comes to be presented - all of these dynamics are subsumed by compositional process and counted alongside pitch organization, rhythmic and textural vocabulary, formal consideration, and instrumentation as compositional method.
Becoming means
Becoming means happens automatically if Point 1 is authentically undertaken. By incorporating details that would otherwise surround composition into the body of compositional work, you automatically become a means of realization for others. The difference in perspective is the difference between the attitude of consumption and that of creation. When an artist books a performance at a venue and expects or hopes that every detail of their experience will be attended to by a team of people beyond their span of influence, they relate to that venue as a consumer; essentially, a series of means has led to a product - the venue - which is then consumed by the artist. When organizers take over a raw space and bring in sound, lighting, decor, artists, and people, they are making something; they are means to everyone involved. The attitude of becoming means is essential to adopting performance as a compositional modality because the composing has already begun before you walk on stage; you are already acting from the mental attitude of composition. All that is required is that you continue that work during your performance.
Engagement with the many facets of performance
Look upon performance as an ontological circumstance that unites all events-based actors including composers, performers, and audience rather than as a point of division. Acknowledging that the act of performance brings together diverse actors across time and space in a socio-historical moment of cultural articulation. These ideas prime the composer-performer for a meaningful engagement with audiences.
Acknowledging the generative nature of audience-hood
Consider showing up, listening, and reflection as generative work responsible in part for the formation of composition. This is central to the attitude that adopts performance as a means of composition. This perspective opens up the compositional subject to the messaging coming from the audience, which is one of the primary benefits of utilizing performance as a compositional strategy.
The suppleness of the performative subject
As much as possible the composer should cultivate circumstances that bring about plasticity within them. This can be by dint of exhaustion, use of psychotropic agents, meditative concentration, pliant performative modalities, or any number of strategies that draw the compositional subject into a psychically supple state. It is in these states that we are most receptive to audiences and to our own recessed compositional ideas and attitudes. We see in the example of the tour that this is brought about through exhaustion and overwhelming exposure to time, place, audiences, and social and cultural circumstances. We see in the rave this is brought about by the sealed-in quality of the space, duration, mind altering agents, collaboration, and audience interaction. Strategizing to produce situations that generate this quality is a key component of the mental attitude that adopts performance as composition.
Maintaining an unfinished quality
In our discussions around the tour and the rave, we observed the manner in which musical composition evolves within those settings. Each of those models present an iteration of composition wherein the finished product is a process; it is not important that the compositional work be repeated exactly - it is more important that the conditions that surround the work promote the continuation of the process and that the management of those conditions are incorporated into compositional practice itself. This allows for continuous exploration and change in terms of what the compositional work can be. It is imperative that this openness to change remains as it facilitates a dynamic wherein composers are receptive to audiences and can attempt things that will inform the compositional work. Maintaining an unfinished quality abandons the formalist attitude toward composition which regards musical composition in the same manner as painting: fixed aesthetic statements with the potential to be regarded as masterpieces. In this way, the formalist bid for perfection is swapped for an imperfect but highly convivial series of expressions; subsequently, composition comes to be regarded more readily as a verb rather than as a noun. This newfound verb-hood of composition activates performance as a meaningful compositional strategy because composers think more of what they are creating rather than of what they have already created.
Composition as inquiry
After enacting the above, you are now composing with social space and becoming means for other actors. Once you have engaged performance and audience, achieved a state of psychic and somatic suppleness, and abandoned hope of finishing your work, you are free to inquire about what you are doing. Bringing the attitude of inquiry to bear on compositional process further enmeshes the composer in with the audience who, largely, are also engaged by processes of inquiry. It becomes “What is this?” versus “Here is this!” Both have merit, but in the inscrutable times we face, the former is more relevant and compelling; it is also more likely to lead to meaningful and relatable work.
Doing composing in performance
Even after expounding upon the first seven points, it is still not entirely clear what it means to compose in performance. I am not suggesting that stream of consciousness free improvisation simply replaces composition or that no preparatory work be conducted. Thought work, strategy, practice, rehearsal - all of these activities obviously contribute positively to the formation of compositional work. The specific suggestion being made here is simply that that work continues in performance (though it could be conducted entirely in performance). The effort is to dislodge the notion of a finished composition you seek to present and replace that with the notion that performance itself can function as the main event of compositional process, thereby including the audience and other actors in what has historically been a hermetically sealed creative practice. This means that, to varying degrees, pitch organization, rhythmic vocabulary, textural vocabulary, formal decision, and expressive faculty will be discovered during performance. This differs from improvisation because you still regard arrival at a repeatable form as a goal, even if that goal is never realized. The effort toward a formal expression that can be continuously reproduced with exactitude is adopted because of its value in activating the group of people who will be involved with this work and bringing them into conviviality and collaboration. The actual mandate that one completes this work is abandoned. This could be regarded as mere laziness but that would miss the central point. The proposal here is replacing a finite amount of work with a never-ending amount of work. A composition is never finished and can always be expounded upon further in performance with audiences. Every composition becomes a lifelong project.
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